Le Guin Omelas Lecture (2024) PDF

URSULA K. LE GUIN & N.K. JEMISIN “THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS” “THE ONES WHO STAY AND FIGHT” … AND THE CHALLENGE OF ANTI-UTOPIAN SKEPTICISM Metafiction: a work of fiction that reflects on its own status as a fiction, its own invention, construction, and artificiality. Utopian metafiction t...

URSULA K. LE GUIN & N.K. JEMISIN “THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS” “THE ONES WHO STAY AND FIGHT” … AND THE CHALLENGE OF ANTI-UTOPIAN SKEPTICISM Metafiction: a work of fiction that reflects on its own status as a fiction, its own invention, construction, and artificiality. Utopian metafiction teaches us about the limits and possibilities of writing a utopia even as a utopia is being written. “Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How to describe the citizens of Omelas?” (277) “Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids … for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? (278)” YOU are invited to help compose the story … “ … 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.” (279)  Notice that the hallmark of the metafictional level of the story is a shift to direct address from the narrator to the reader (“I”/“you” talk), as opposed to third-person narration ( he/she/it/they) CHALLENGES OF THE UTOPIAN WRITER 1. “The Treason of the Artist” (p. 278): “… I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness 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 and 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. (278, emphasis added) - Happiness is boring, simple, naïve – an illusion or delusion. If you’re happy, you’re not paying attention! - Cynicism, skepticism, and pessimism always seem smarter. These anti-utopian attitudes carry more cultural prestige. - Happiness is super hard to write about. In fact, it may be the enemy of plot itself, since plots typically need crisis, tension, antagonism, or struggle to drive the story forward. (Le Guin adds: “One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt” (279). Shout out to the most fundamental plot in Judeo-Christian cultures, the fall from grace into sin/guilt. That basic plot is not at her disposal here!) But Le Guin calls this way of devaluing happiness/utopianism a “bad habit,” even a form of artistic treason: The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness 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.  Here the artistic and intellectual allure of pain, suffering, evil, pessimism and despair DO NOT amount to clear-eyed realism and truth-telling.  Instead, these attitudes are a form of giving up: complicity with the powers that be in perpetuating the violence of the status quo (“if you can’t lick ‘em, join ’em”) “This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”  philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” to describe the complicity of millions of everyday people in the Nazi Holocaust: - The genocide was not the work of one inhuman monster (Hitler) - It required the minor contributions, and even just the inaction, of hundreds of thousands of everyday people who were just going about their lives, “just doing their jobs,” without causing a fuss. - Thus the banality of evil – the boringness, the normalness – of the underlying social attitudes that allow a nation to carry out unimaginable horrors, up to and including genocide.  The phrase “banality of evil” asks us to consider the forms of violence we tacitly accept at all times as members of a society … things we have become so used to that we can hardly see them at all. These forms of violence are usually carried out against beings deemed unworthy, useless, or undesirable. “But to praise despair and 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.”  Le Guin suggests that, in the context of normalized suffering and powerlessness, the real task of the artist is NOT to glamorize pain, but to dare to visualize its opposite : societal JOY. It’s easy to be a dystopian, she suggests – the real artistic challenge is to be a a Utopian. CHALLENGES OF THE UTOPIAN WRITER: 2. THE SKEPTICISM/DISBELIEF OF THE READER “O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you.” (278) “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. In a basement…” (p.280-281)  Le Guin casts this turn to the basement, the revelation of the “dark side” of Utopia, as demanded by us, by her skeptical readers, who find societal happiness too dull, naïve, and impossible to believe in. “Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?” (283) THE ”STRICT” AND “ABSOLUTE” TERMS OF THE UTOPIAN BARGAIN: “All understand that the their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery. … They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. … The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child” (282) FROM THE PERSPECTIVE Le Guin calls “OMELAS”: “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” (282). FROM THE PERSPECTIVE Le Guin attributes to WILLIAM JAMES (“THE AMERICAN CONSCIENCE”) “… a specifical and independent sort of emotion … would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?” Connecting the dots: THE FICTION & the METAFICTION The Moral Paradox of Omelas: “[The citizens of Omelas] all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” “They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. “The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.” (282) “Omelas” operates on a strict utilitarian calculus; the condition of the many outweighs that of the one: “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” (282).  A fair topic for moral debate.  But notice that while the “terms” of this moral paradox are clearly delineated, their source and their enforcement is left entirely unexplained.  The terms are very strict, but we never learn their origin – where they came from, who enforces them, by what power or logic they operate.  Yet as we have seen, the metafictional frame gives us an answer. “The terms” are given and enforced by us, readers with an anti-utopian bias so deep and strong that we literally could not accept the happy story unless it The ‘moral’ of the metafiction (and a question): The story suggests that we could not, would not believe in the possibility of Omelas, the possibility of collective happiness, until the writer tainted it with a moral compromise so shocking that it reinstated the superiority of our actually-existing society over the utopian promise of happiness for all. How does the anti-utopian suspicion (which passes for realism) induce us to accept widespread social immiseration as preferable to the risk supposedly posed by radical alternatives to the status quo? THE END OF THE STORY: A quiet ode to “the ones who walk away from Omelas”: “They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.” (284)  At a first level, the ones who walk away are those who refuse the terrible moral bargain: those who would rather give up their happiness than live with the knowledge that it is predicated upon the misery of another.  But when Le Guin writes that “the place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness” – she is willfully invoking the very definition of utopia, and suggesting that beyond Omelas, there might lie a utopia that is more perfect because it is even less imaginable, even harder to believe.  If the metafictional frame has exposed our complicity as readers in needing utopianism to have a terrible, dystopian secret, then “the ones who walk away from Omelas” may be those who reject the moral price we have imposed.  Could it be that they are walking away, not from utopia, but away from the widespread conviction that that every society needs a scapegoat, that the project of collective happiness must undermine personal freedom, that we are better off with the world as it is than the world that might be? N.K. JEMISIN, THE ONES WHO STAY AND FIGHT (2018) Discussion Questions: 1) What is the significance of the change in title, from “walk away” to “stay and fight”? What, according to this story, has to be fought for and against in order to make utopia possible? 2) How does Jemisin differ from Le Guin in the way she uses metafiction to conscript the reader into the story? What readerly reactions does this story expect and try to challenge? There is history rather than malice in this, and it is still being actively, intentionally corrected—because the people of Um-Helat are not naive believers in good intentions as the solution to all ills. No, there are no worshippers of mere tolerance here, nor desperate grovelers for that grudging pittance of respect which is diversity. Um-Helatians are learned enough to understand what must be done to make the world better, and pragmatic Does that seem wrong to you? It should not. The enough to actually enact it. trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by those concealing ill intent, of insisting that people already suffering should be afflicted with further, unnecessary pain. This is the paradox of tolerance, the treason of free speech: We hesitate to admit that some people are just fucking evil and need to be stopped. This is Um-Helat, after all, and not that barbaric America. This is not Omelas, a tick of a city,  I confess I am puzzled as to why you are so angry. It’s almost as if you feel threatened by the very idea of equality. Almost as if some part of you needs to be angry. Needs unhappiness and injustice. But... do you? Do you? Do you believe, friend? Do you accept the Day of Good Birds, the city, the joy? No? Then let me tell you one more thing. … THE ROLE OF THE “SOCIAL WORKERS” In such a place, buoyed by the luxury of safety and comfort, people may seek knowledge solely for knowledge’s sake. But some knowledge is dangerous. The languages spoken in Um-Helat were once our languages, yes —for this world was once our world; it was not so much parallel as the same, back then. You might still recognize the languages, but what would puzzle you is how they speak... and how they don’t. Oh, some of this will be familiar to you in concept at least, like terms for gender that mean neither he nor she, and the condemnation of words meant to slur and denigrate. And yet you will puzzle over the Um-Helatians’ choice to retain descriptive terms for themselves like kinky-haired or fat or deaf. But these are just words, friend, don’t you see? Without the attached contempt, such terms have no more meaning than if horses could proudly introduce themselves as palomino or miniature or hairy-footed. Difference was never the problem in and of itself—and Um- Helatians still have differences with each other, of opinion and otherwise. Of course they do! They’re people. But what shocks the young citizens of Um-Helat is the realization that, once, those differences of opinion involved differences in respect. That once, value was ascribed to some people, and not others. That once, humanity was acknowledged for some, and not others. It’s the Day of Good Birds in Um-Helat, where every soul matters, and even the idea that some might not is anathema. … The information-gleaners know that what they do is wrong. They know this is what destroyed the old cities. And indeed, they are horrified at what they hear through the speakers, see on the screens. They begin to perceive that ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity. “How could they?” the gleaners exclaim, of us. “Why would they do such things? How can they just leave those people to starve? Why do they not listen when that one complains of disrespect? What does it mean that these ones have been assaulted and no one, no one, cares? Who treats other people like that?” And yet, even amid their marvel, they share the idea. The evil... spreads. So the social workers of Um-Helat stand, talking now, over the body of a man. He is dead—early, Poor child. She is nearly septic with the taint of our world. Nearly. But then our social worker, the tall brown one who got a hundred strangers to smile at a handmade ladybug, crouches and offers a hand to the child. What? What surprises you? Did you think this would end with the cold-eyed slaughter of a child? There are other options—and this is Um- Helat, friend, where even a pitiful, diseased child matters. But there is only one treatment for this toxin once it gets into the blood: fighting it. Tooth and nail, spear and claw, up close and brutal; no quarter can be given, no parole, no debate. The child must grow, and learn, and become another social worker fighting an endless war against an idea... but she will live, and help others, and find meaning in that. If she takes the woman’s hand. Does this work for you, at last, friend? Does the possibility of harsh enforcement add enough realism? Are you better able to accept this postcolonial utopia now that you see its bloody teeth? Ah, but they did not choose this battle, the people of Um-Helat today; their ancestors did, when they spun lies and ignored conscience in order to profit from others’ pain. Their greed became a philosophy, a religion, a series of nations, all built on blood. Um- Helat has chosen to be better. But sometimes, only by blood sacrifice may true evil be kept at bay. And now we come to you, my friend. My little soldier. See what I’ve done? So insidious, these little thoughts, going both ways along the quantum path. Now, perhaps, you will think of Um-Helat, and wish. Now you might finally be able to envision a world where people have learned to love, as they learned in our world to hate. Perhaps you will speak of Um-Helat to others, and spread the notion farther still, like joyous birds migrating on trade winds. It’s possible. Everyone—even the poor, even the lazy, even the undesirable—can matter. Do you see how just the idea of this provokes utter rage in some? That is the infection defending itself... because if enough of us believe a thing is possible, then it becomes so. And then? Who knows. War, maybe. The fire of fever and the purging scourge. No one wants that, but is not the alternative to lie helpless, spotty and blistered and heaving, until we all die? So don’t walk away. The child needs you, too, don’t you see? You also have to fight for her, now that you know she exists, or walking away is meaningless. Here, here is my hand. Take it. Please. 1. In her prefatory remarks, Le Guin cites the American philosopher William James as her source for the moral bargain at the heart of the story. In an interesting choice of words, Le Guin says “The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated” (p. 275) Why does she see this thought experiment as a perfect expression of a particularly American dilemma of conscience? 2. I didn’t talk at all about the details of “Omelas.” What struck you about the choices Le Guin makes (and refuses to make) in terms of the contents of this Utopia? 3. Is there a parallel between the suspicion toward, and critique of, Utopianism that emerges in this story and Syzmborska’s poem, “Utopia,” which many of you read in class on Thursday? 4. What’s in a