Submitted by feanor_imc t3_1096m8m in books
How is it possible that a short story can transmit such a powerful message? I don't want to spoil anything because it is a short story, but the impression it gaves you when you finished it... It's been a week and I am still feeling it.
Every time I think about it, I can make a new lecture about Omelas and The Ones who walk away.
I have read Catwings, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness but nothing prepared me for this.
Is this from an interview?
Wikipedia cites the source as Kennedy, X.J., and Dana Gioia (ed.): An Introduction to Fiction, 8th ed., page 274. Longman, 2004.
But it sounds like she talked about this on several occasions, probably in interviews. She also included the subtitle "Variations on a theme by William James" to indicate (what she thought was) the provenance of the idea.
It’s also in the introduction essay in The Unreal and the Real Volume 2: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin: Outer Space & Inner Lands
I’d go take a picture to prove it, but I’m in bed and it’s cold.
Also in the introduction to the story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, where she ties the origin to James's The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. She quotes this paragraph:
>Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which 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?
Right after that she quotes another bit from the same essay, which I've always loved:
>All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
She goes on to say "The application of those two sentences to this story, and to science fiction, and to all thinking about the future, is quite direct. Ideals as "the probable causes of future experience" - that is a subtle and an exhilarating remark!"
Edit(s): typo(s)
While TBK did explore whether the sacrifice of Jesus can justify salvation for all, the torture of that kid in Omelas would more closely mirror the torture of innocent children in Ivan’s examples in TBK.
Ivan Karamazov quite clearly thought that paradise and the entirety of knowledge are not worth the tears of a single innocent child, and that’s exactly what Le Guin was discussing - not a single willing participant to be sacrificed, but a child who doesn’t even understand why he’s suffering.
I preach the gospel of Ursula le Guin to absolutely anyone who will listen, she's one of my five favorite writers but definitely the least well-known out of all of them.
I swear Reddit thinks everyone other than King and Rowling is unknown.
I work a white-collar job with loads of college-educated folks who read a lot in their free time, and have only been met with blank stares just about every time I have ever recommended her. It baffles me, too.
People that read f&sf are weird
I don't know anybody who reads what I'm into. Most men I know read non fiction and women read literature, chick lit, self help
Everybody reads mysteries nobody reads fiction about post apocalyptic America.
That's my experience anyway and I ask everybody what they read
I go in 5 or 6 different houses a day and I always look for the book shelf. Nobody has anything good
I pretty much exclusively read spec fiction and nonfiction. Regular fiction and mysteries bore me to tears. There’s nothing there to titillate the mind and make me think and re-think new concepts.
I cut my teeth on Dune and Ceasar’s Column. As I matured, my tastes transitioned to The Sheep Look Up and The Culture series. In my teens, I had an entire 2 year stint where I exclusively read nuclear apocalypse fiction (Level 7 is by far my favorite in that category full of standouts). Right now, I’m taking a palate cleaner by reading Mark Kurlansky. I just finished Salt; A World History and will be moving onto The Last Fish Tale.
After that, it’s back into Scifi with Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey. I read the Ancillary series and An Empire Called Memory duology not too long ago. Based on them, I’m thinking about digging into language-oriented scifi, if that’s even a sub genre.
I’m 30f and my wife is the polar opposite. She is exclusively chick lit and Christmas lit. She loves having the post-read discussions, though, as I talk through whatever new and interesting concept from my latest read. We had a great talk about languages without gendered pronouns not too long ago.
I’ll gladly send some recommendations your way.
Don't forget Brando Sando!
> I swear Reddit thinks everyone other than King and Rowling is unknown.
While Guin is one of the great scifi authors, scifi is often considered a niche genre and she is an older author. Finding Guin in a modern bookstore can be a challenge.
Even finding the scifi section of any big box bookstore can be a challenge. It’s certainly the smallest section in Barnes and Noble, and has to share with high fantasy….which in turn is being overtaken by D&D and other table top gaming supplies.
I'm a big reader .... but never read le Guin..... where to start?
You've got a few options!
...if you'd like to check out a novel, The Left Hand of Darkness was my first, and what got me hooked, personally. I followed that with The Lathe of Heaven.
...if you'd like to check out some of her short stories, which are stellar, I'd suggest The Unreal and the Real, a big collection.
...if you'd like to check out an essay of hers you can read in a few minutes, enjoy! https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html
...and if you liked that essay, two of my favorite collections of hers are No Time to Spare and Words are My Matter.
Read the essay.... yup... she's got it. Sent off to three friends as so thought provoking
So glad you liked. She's a real gem.
Fantastic. Will start there. I have to trust you ... my brother in law is also a Darko
I listened to The Dispossessed in a single sitting I was so enthralled by it. Cannot recommend that book enough
One of my favorites, too.
I love teaching this story. When students tell me they’d walk away I say ok give me your phone and go start making your own clothes to show them it’s easier said than done.
I really don't get how everyone's take away from this story is about whether or not they would walk away.
Le Guin is crystal clear from the beginning that The Ones Who Walk Away is a meta-fictional critique of how we think about Utopia and Dystopia. The most powerful passage is in the middle where she writes:
>Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?
>
>They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us.
>
>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 happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
>
>How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time.
The child suffering that is necessary to keep the utopia going and which leads some citizens to walk away in disgust appears when she concedes that we cannot even imagine the joy of utopian Omelas without making it a parable about how things can never be perfect. And the point of the people who walk away isn't that they're morally superior to everyone else, it's that they can imagine and are building a pure utopia that we cannot even imagine and LeGuin cannot even compellingly describe. And we should feel weird about it, why does a fairly realistic take on a post-scarcity world only feel real when we add a single suffering child, what the fuck does a lonely child crying have to do with whether or not the good life is possible?
To be one of the people who walks away isn't to give up your iphone or go vegan or whatever, it's to be able to conceive of and build a future where no sacrifice, no pain, no suffering is remotely necessary. You can have your iphone, and food that tastes like exactly like meat (whether it is or isn't meat is up to your imagination) or maybe even better, you can easily get anywhere and do anything as long as you aren't hurting anyone. But you aren't a protagonist, you aren't special, there is no hierarchy for you to work your way up through, there's no one to lord being better over, there isn't some secret shame to keep you endlessly moving forward. The real test of Omelas is whether you can imagine a world where you are happy even if no one, anywhere, has it worse then you.
Stories can have multiple meanings, the best ones usually do. What I took away from this story was that reader’s are repulsed by the citizens of Omelas for allowing the child’s suffering to go on, meanwhile we are far from a Utopia in our world, but we do have some comforts which are available to us thanks to the suffering of not just one person but several. It’s about exploitation, suffering, and judging others. The idea that art holds up a mirror to society is a bit cliche but that’s what my experience reading this was, a mirror being held up.
It's absolutely fair to see different meanings in stories. My beef is that there's a kind of vulgar interpretation of the meaning you're taking that directly contradicts and undermines the meaning that I'm talking about.
When people talk about the story like Le Guin is asking them to leave city life, industrial agriculture, technology, meat eating etc, etc, behind, that feels to me like the same failure of imagination Le Guin is critiquing. You are siding with the people of Omelas that comfort and happiness require abominable suffering, and you're choosing instead to suffer yourself, or you're not even getting there and just assuming that if you do everything the people of Omelas don't (IE live like a hermit in the woods) you are somehow not part of that society or your truck or cult or whatever you have with you in the woods aren't also fueled by the suffering of others.
Obviously in the real world there are tradeoffs and someone doing better sometimes means other people have to suffer, but even in our current, broken world, there are a lot of things we could do that would make everyone better off that we sometimes can't do out of a bitter habit of seeing everything as zero sum. Just going off the things in the story, it's totally possible to imagine that we could have dense, walkable cities with good public transit, abundant cheap food and energy, street fairs, orgies, computers, whatever, and to have the continued operation of all of those things not require any suffering.
I think of it more in terms of the social contract, the ones who walk away are doing so out of disgust for this city’s social contract. It’s definitely a moral situation, we’re told “one thing there is none of in Omelas is guilt.” After a litany of things that might constitute aspects of Omelas we get this one grain of certainty. It’s because anyone who experiences guilt ends up leaving. Guilt and Omelas are contradictory, they cannot coexist. Like you suggest, they might leave in order to build something better because they can conceive of it(forgive me if I’m getting your take wrong, not trying to put words in your mouth), but there’s almost certainly an element of morality guiding their decision. They would prefer to go without all these pleasures because they become hollow in light of the child’s suffering. At least in other places, there’s an element of free will behind people’s suffering, choices they’ve made that led them there, but the child is innocent, arbitrary even. I did an undergraduate thesis called Utopia, Dystopia, and Catharsis(wish I’d known about this story at the time but I didn’t) and the premise was that the reason the Utopia that actually turns out to be a Dystopia is such a popular story to tell and to hear is that there’s often a lack of free will or a lack of morality. Seeing these perfect places lack these things makes us feel better because even though our world has poverty, starvation, war, injustice etc., at least we have free will unlike those characters, or at least we try to be moral unlike those characters.
I quite enjoyed this exchange of perspectives.
The ones that walk away haven't alleviated the suffering. Being disgusted does not make them superior. If they/we imagine that it somehow makes them better, then they/we are still vampires feasting on the child's suffering.
I like your free will question and your undergrad thesis sounds super interesting, but I don't think your readings of the guilt line is supportable, as narratively that aside is before the narrator concedes that Omelas is a dystopia, and is mostly in the context of whether the summer festival would have orgies. People in Omelas are free and that freedom includes freedom from any system of morality or social mores that would feel oppressive or cause them to feel guilt.
I think you're onto something about Omelas and free will, but I would flip it around. We tend to think about free will in terms of the ability to fix things that are broken and break things that are perfect. If you can't do both, you aren't free. Ask us to picture a perfect world, and we can only imagine it as some sort of cage, but Omelas is just imperfect enough for people to not just like, murder each other to rattle the bars. Staying in Omelas is a constant, free, uncoerced choice of their comfort over their integrity. You get to live an almost perfect life in total certainty of your own free will.
I tend to think of intentionally breaking the social contract as revolt, which is why it's interesting that no one takes up arms against the injustice, or gets thrown out, or starts a fight over the child. The people who leave either leave immediately after learning about the child or go through a few days of deep contemplation and then just walk out. Just as importantly, they aren't just leaving, they are going somewhere. Probably they are disgusted by the suffering of the child, but there is something deeper than that that actually motivates them to leave.
I think it’s a pretty clear use of juxtaposition of presence and absence(guilt being the absent thing) and possibility and certainty, so I think her intent is to draw our attention to a lack of guilt, even if it takes us reading it a second time to make the connection. It doesn’t matter when we’re told it’s a dystopia, we can and should look at the text as a whole.
When talking about free will I also like to discuss agency. How free/able are we to realistically enact our free will. Sure, women can ride the subway after midnight, but they don’t have the same agency to do it as a man because of a greater threat to them. Not sure I get your break things that are perfect line because freedom can be breaking things that just are. So, do the people of Omelas have full agency to go along with their free will? It’s like a lot of mythology, Pandora’s box, tree of knowledge. There’s a rule that can’t be broken or else. So long as you don’t break it, everything’s great, perfect even.
Some of my best students have suggested kidnapping the child, finding allies, and invading Omelas as opposed to simply leaving.
My point about the guilt line occurring before the dystopia concession has to do with how I read the story as a meta-narrative. The first part of the story is about a utopia and a meditation on why writing utopias is hard. Everything in the first part is true of Omelas, but it should also be true of a different utopia, or maybe even of the place the people who leave Omelas go. This section ends a little after the part I quoted when the narrator decides to concede a dystopian flaw to the reader, who she believes hasn't been able to suspend disbelief or enjoy the story up to this point.
You can read the free of guilt line as a ban on guilt along the lines of guilt about what happens to the child, but I think its also worth noting that the surface reading is that the world LeGuin wants, the one without child torture, would also be free of guilt. Perhaps the people of Omelas should feel guilt and shame, but it matters that the people who leave should be rid of guilt and shame when they get to where they are going.
I do think people in Omelas have both perfect freedom and perfect agency, everyone that is, except the child. What's brilliant about the child is that freeing it is not something anyone would do for themselves, its something they think they should want to do for the child, but they don't because to do so would also be selfish in terms of exposing a much greater number of people to suffering.
If you violently invade Omelas to save the child and kill/punish those most complicit in the child's suffering (so they don't just put a new child in the dungeon), you just replace the salvation through one suffering soul narrative of the child with salvation through the much greater suffering of the people killed and maimed by your invasion. You can leave Omelas any time you want but there is no way to change Omelas that doesn't produce greater suffering.
It’s a question of what’s more fair, consolidating suffering to one person or spreading it out unevenly across many. The other thing with the guilt line for me is I’ve always kicked around this idea in my head that the cities of heaven are filled with those who live without regret. And so are the cities of hell. The first meaning that being able to move past your regrets and being forgiven is a heavenly reward and that when we’re not carrying it around we can be better to one another and if people are better to one another there’s less to forgive and forgiveness is also easier because we’re not resentful of not having received forgiveness. The second meaning is that there’s another kind of person who lives without regret and this is a punishment because while you can indulge in any pleasure or violence you want, so can everyone else and all the evil inclinations bad people have get amped up when they get sent to hell and they all punish one another. So with respect to the story, I see them as the kind who see themselves as having nothing to feel guilty about and nothing to regret, so that’s the moment we should know it’s a dystopia, not the invention of the child. It’s also an exception to your meta-narrative because everything prior is almost like a coloring book where we’re given a framework but can customize it, but then we’re told there can’t be guilt, she’s certain of it. That line kind of exists outside the commentary on writing a Utopia.
If they can’t free or help the child they don’t have perfect agency, that’s pretty straightforward imo.
I like the heaven and hell thing you've brought up, it reminds me of the parable of the long spoons, generally I feel like heaven and hell allegories are compelling when they hold a mirror up to the person in them and unsatisfying when they involve externally directed punishment or torture. The most narratively satisfying hells are the ones where you can leave at any time if you simply accept the goodness in the world and god's love, but some people are too broken to do so.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'they can't free or help the child' the child is not particularly guarded, the door to its cell is locked but that's about it, we aren't told who has the key but it seems like many people have access to the cell, hell the cell may only be locked from the inside for all the narrator tells us. No one is externally prevented from freeing the child. No one is even told not to free the child, they are simply told that their way of life cannot exist without the child's suffering.
Actions have consequences, that isn't a constraint on freedom, its simply a fact about the world. If I jump off a tall building, is it a constraint on my freedom that I will fall to my death rather than flying?
We were talking about agency though, and so like with Pandora’s box or the Apple in Eden they are told not to do it. If I’m not allowed to scratch my nose because if I do a loved one of mine will die, then I’m only really free to scratch my nose in theory. I’m free, but my agency is severely limited.
I'm confused by the analogy to Eve eating the apple and pandora's box.
Pandora's story is pretty murky in a lot of retellings, but while someone may have told her not to open the box, it is pretty clear that she didn't know what the consequences of opening the box would be. Hell contemporary classicists aren't super clear on what the consequences of opening the box were supposed to be.
Eve is more cut and dry in that she's forbidden from eating the fruit and is deceived into doing so anyway, but again, while there is a fair amount of hubris in making the choice, the main way in which she lacks freedom in doing so is that she isn't clear on the consequences of making it.
I'm not really sure what you mean by 'agency' either. Traditionally there are two types of freedom, freedom from obstacles and freedom from need. Some scholars extend freedom from need to include 'self mastery' ie being able to control your needs and not have dependence on something others can do without.
It is pretty clear that the people from Omelas have both freedom from constraint and freedom from need, the aside about drooz also demonstrates that self-mastery is fairly ubiquitous in their society although perhaps not universal.
To use your analogy, I would say that if I have been told by some external actor that if I scratch my nose they will kill my loved one, that would impact my freedom from obstacles, a foreign actor is constraining my choices to their own ends, and framing it as forbidden or 'if you do x, y will happen' is just a semantic distinction.
If on the other hand, by some inherent quirk of my and a loved ones physiology, scratching my nose is intrinsically linked to stopping that loved ones heart, that is not a constraint on my freedom any more than not having wings is a constraint on my freedom.
The suffering of the child is foundational and intrinsic to everything that makes Omelas good. And no one is deceived about the nature of the choice to leave the child to suffer. I would say its a pretty freely made choice.
Agency is your ability to enact your free will. I’d love to drop everything and go visit Europe, but I have to hold down a job to pay bills and feed myself. A billionaire could go visit Europe on a whim because they don’t have the concerns I do. In theory me and the billionaire have the same free will, but when you account for how realistically we can act on it, they have more agency than I do. Same with my example regarding women riding the subway in an earlier comment. So in a lot of mythology, maybe Pandora wasn’t a good example I thought she was told not to open it like Eve being told not to eat the apple, there’s a MacGuffin of sorts where they are free to enjoy paradise or a superhuman ability or whatever so long as they don’t do X. In Omelas they are told they can’t intercede on behalf off the child otherwise it all falls apart. So they have the free will to do it but not the agency. So agency could also be thought of as revealing the extent to which our free will is an illusion. If the people in Omelas were truly free they’d be able to save the child, but the world is structured in a way that ensures that they don’t. Almost akin to structural injustices in our own world which limit the agency of certain people despite them technically having free will.
I think you are right that in the classic modern version of the story Pandora is told not to open the box although she is not told why, IIRC she's made to think its a present she has to wait to open.
I'm not sure quite how to square your concept of agency (coming from what sounds like a literary background) with my concept of freedom (coming from someone in political science grad school). Having to pay bills and feed yourself is arguably an infringement on your freedom from need. You are subordinated to others because you have to eat and have shelter and those needs create opportunities for exploitation that you aren't protected from. Not being able to go to Europe is arguably an infringement on your freedom from obstacles, but its sort of a gray area, since your ability to get to Europe is presumably contingent on exploitative relationships with others (pilots, airline employees, taxi drivers, etc).
I would also say that beyond freedom from need stuff, most of the greater agency a billionaire has is not per se personal freedom but the ability to compel the subordination of others to his or her will. That is, the additional freedom/agency/whatever you want to call it of a billionaire compared to you is mostly built on other people being less free then they otherwise would be.
And this is where I have a hard time with how your concept of agency relates to Omelas, for one person to have the agency to remove the child without causing social collapse would imply a level of agency that is only possible by subordinating others. You can't generalize that kind of agency since any increase in it for one person is inherently a reduction for someone else, so a society where someone can free the child cannot possibly be more free than Omelas.
That last sentence was similar to my immediate thought after finishing the story just now: Never mind the ones who walk away from Omelas, why aren’t there ones who attempt Scapegoat-Child-Rescue Crimes in Omelas? This to me is a major practical problem with the conceit: There could never be a society 100% free of violence and oppression but for a single scapegoat whose suffering is known and accepted by all, because there would always be a few who would try to wreck the bargain by direct action, and now we have a conflict which motivates violence.
One could say "It's part of the premise that nobody decides to do that." But:
I took a completely different message from the story.
To walk away from Omelas - to walk away from a paradise where you feel no pain - is to go to a place where things aren't as perfect, where your life will be worse in some way.
It is a conscious decision to shoulder some of the pain on yourself because you inderstand that it is morally wrong to dump your suffering onto others.
Everything in life has a cost. Sometimes, but usually not, that cost is in dollars. Usually it is in time, energy, physical or mental discomfort, or even pain.
The people of Omelas lived in a place where the cost of their happiness was paid for by someone else. To walk away is to recognize the inherent injustice of this, and to refuse to be a part of it.
I don't see from Le Guin's commentary on the story that this was something she was mainly trying to convey, but regardless of authorial intention, I think you're pointing out something important to be drawn from the work here. I bet UKL would have agreed.
I don’t see how anyone can treat that with any weight either, because you already have to assume people will have no conflicting desires. How will you solve a love triangle with 3 monogamous individuals? What if two people disagree on something being right or wrong?
Scarcity is hardly the only cause for suffering, and that’s the only part that can be solved in a compelling way. That’s what makes it feel like tripe, the biggest obstacle to utopia being ignored and being told ‘don’t worry about it’.
At least a miserable child is a veneer to place over the gaping hole in logic, and people wonder why that makes it more believable? Because it’s at least some semblance of an answer in this made up fantasy world(that also only follows the author’s views and does not reflect reality at all)
I'd like to think I would walk away. I read it shortly after I went vegan and I realated to it.
I always tell them they're hurting the child more. The child is still suffering the same, but there is less return on happiness.
That's only compelling under a utilitarian ethic, though.
My favorite le Guin is Always Coming Home, a very hopefully look at a post-climate catastrophe Earth which features one of the most realistic takes on what self aware AI would do. It's also a very interestingly written book, more of a collection of related works than one coherent novel.
Set in a civilization actually made for humans
One of my favorite books. My twin brother and I were strongly influenced by this book, it led to us both being environmental activists for many years. I always felt, however, that Le Guin sort of "copped out" regarding the conflict between the Kesh and the Condor People: personally, I thought the Condors would conquer the Kesh, as they had other peoples in that far-future setting. I never really accepted Le Guin's pat assurance -- via Pandora -- that, eventually, the Condors would implode, due to their own toxic culture. Thirteen-year-old me always wanted to add, "... But only after they've destroyed the Kesh!" I think it was because I felt like a Kesh in a world dominated by a culture like the Condor People, and I desperately wanted to know how the Kesh managed to survive.
Nice to see discussion of Le Guin with (at this point) 80 or so comments.
It’s really one of the very great short stories, and one that is hard to forget about.
I recommend reading N.K. Jemisins „The Ones Who Stay and Fight“, which was written as a reply to Omelas. My opinion on it is a lot more split, but it is worth reading.
Just read them both. I get what she was doing but Jemisin definitely should have riffed off of someone else.
Her prose is but a pale shadow of Leguin's mastery. Held side-by-side, it shows.
That’s part of what I think as well. Her story seems a bit critical of Le Guin‘s, and well, the best thing I can say in that case is that it’s nice that she has so much confidence.
I always felt that she somehow missed the point a bit, or offered a response that doesn’t work on the same level, but I can’t really formulate it well right now.
Still, it is a story well worth reading for the perspective.
Aye. Jemisin’s story seems, for lack of a better term, mean spirited, as though she were personally offended by Omelas.
In an interview in the Paris Review, NK Jamison said:
“With Le Guin’s story, at the end of it, she’s suggesting that the only way to create a society that is a better place is to walk away from this one or to go off the grid. That’s not really what she’s saying, specifically, but that’s what a lot of people have concluded. But no, you’ve got to fix it, especially when there’s nowhere to walk away to. You go anywhere else in our current world and you’re either being completely exploited by capitalism or somewhat exploited by capitalism. So, I mean, it’s just a question of what kind of suffering you want to put yourself through.”
That comment (and others from the interview) demonstrate that Jemisin does get the original questions and points Leguin is trying to make with Omelas. It’s pretty easy to draw the line from Le Guin’s critique of our cultural mindset in Omelas (there’s that paragraph or two where she says the people are happy but she invents the suffering child because to us, we are unable to believe any society could be happy without at least someone suffering) to Jemisin’s argument that such a world with no widespread human-caused suffering or pain is something we have to fight to create and maintain. The title is in conversation with and exploring the meaning of “walking away.” I think Le Guin would agree considering she called Odo, the anti-capitalist revolutionary and founding member of the Anarchist society from The Dispossessed, “one who walked away from Omelas.” I can’t remember which essay she mentioned that in.
I think part of the problem for me, at least, is that I don't see any significant moral difference between Um-Helat and Omelas, yet they're presented by Jemisin as if they're somehow different. The only difference I can see is the number of sufferers, and Jemisin seems, in the end, to present Um-Helat as desirable, but the suffering of the child in Omelas as undesireable.
Absolutely, thanks for sharing!
I may be plucking this right out of my arse, but didn't LeGuin also write a story that came after, directly focusing on what may have or did happen to the ones that walked away?
Or maybe I'm just getting mixed up with Jemisin's story...
It's possible that you could be mixing it up with her story The Day Before the Revolution that describes Odo, the woman who started the anarchist revolution at the heart of The Dispossessed. In her introduction to the story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, LeGuin describes Odo as "one of the ones who walked away from Omelas." (Though she clearly means that in a very figurative sense; it's not at all set in the same world as Omelas.)
That's certainly ringing some bells, so I think you're bang on. I've only read The Direction of The Road, and Omelas, so my wider LeGuin knowledge is pretty thin. Must have over-egged the connection in my head. I'll have to give that a read all the same now it's got my attention.
It's a lovely story; it and Omelas bring a tear to my eye each time I read them. It would be best to read it after reading Dispossessed so you know just who Odo is and what a change she made in her world, but it's a treasure on its own.
Edit: I'm re-reading it now, and this jumped out at me as relevant to the theme of Omelas:
>There would not be slums like this, if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition, to be Mama taking tragedy away from the children so they won't hurt themselves. Anything but. So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn't the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people.
Blimey. That is one damn good excerpt.
If she has, then I’ve never heard of it (and would be excited to read it!).
Further research is leading me nowhere. Wishful thinking, it seems.
The Ones Who Walk Away from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Is that it?
Omelas is a very white liberal boomer story. My parents are both hippies who walked away from bougie families to live out in the woods, trying not to be part of a bad system. Of course in real life you can't really escape the system, but they tried and thanks to their privilege they could have land and freedom to raise some hippie kids and make a lot of art. Not a bad life at all, but also did they really change anything?
The Ones Who Stay and Fight seems to me to come from a much more grounded perspective. Walking away is just a safety valve for Omelas.
you're reading it incredibly literally.
There's also "The Ones Who Walk Away from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," which sounds similar to the Jemisin story--stay and fight.
[deleted]
But what if there was one child who never ever got omelets? Would this be an acceptable price to pay for unlimited omelets?
Interesting but not really relevant tidbit: Omelas = Salem O(regon) backwards. I believe the story is that she saw a road sign in her rear view mirror and said to herself that that would make a good fictional town name.
[removed]
The connection between Omelas and BTS’s Spring Day is what drove me to explore BTS’s discography even more (and then finding even more connections between their lyrics, videos, and books). The moment in their music video where the Omelas vacancy sign changes is very moving.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a masterpiece.
SAME 💜
I used to teach that story alongside To Kill A Mockingbird. Teenagers found the question it raises really interesting! How much suffering are you willing to assign to the vulnerable in order to stay comfortable?
Reminded me of the scene in The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan talks about the hypothetical little girl locked away in the shack, praying to God to save her. Incredibly emotionally moving stuff.
If you liked The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, you might really like her novel The Dispossessed as well. She plays with a lot more ethical and sociopolitical questions there too.
It’s not even hypothetical, Ivan said it was a “real life” example that happened in Russia, not a thought experiment he made up to challenge Alyosha.
Anyhow, yes The Dispossessed is sort of a continuation of that question, and it’s honestly one of the best sci-fi there is too.
The left hand of darkness had an equal effect on me. Absolutely loved it
Reading this out loud was my introduction to LeGuin. It's so brief, yet I enjoyed every second reading it like that. Dwelling on the imagery longer than I might if I were scanning the page sort of thing.
[deleted]
By the way, a writer wrote "The Ones Who Walk Away from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" as a sort of sequel. You can look it up, it was in a recent issue of a popular SF magazine like Asimov's or something.
And there was an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this past year that features an Omelas-like situation.
That was one of my favorite episodes in Strange New Worlds. I think it was maybe the one episode that was trying to stretch beyond the sort of usual Star Trek plots. As good as season 1 was I'm crossing my fingers that in season 2 they take a few more risks in the stories they tell and maybe end up with one or two new classic episodes.
Read this once as a middle schooler and I still remember it/how I felt reading it.
[deleted]
[removed]
I love the story as well. Brilliant writing on the choices and perspectives of a so-called "ideal" society.
This reminds me of a terrible David Brooks (establishment hack, a useful idiot for people who consider themselves more sophisticated observers of the news, for context) NTY article that used a Those Who Walk Away From Omelas reference to defend all sorts of modern atrocities and injustices in the US and abroad. He completely misunderstands the story on purpose just to push propaganda for the US empire, he's pathetic. It's like Brooks couldn't ever become a real writer on his own merits and so he had to resort to cobbling together some distorted parodies of other people's great works like Omelas.
He literally tried to justify the US invasion of Iraq by saying that not walking away from Omelas was not only perfectly reasonable, but necessary, and so we have to just put up with all sorts of heinous shit in order to tell ourselves this is a good and just and free society. I cant believe he held a job at the NY Times for so damn long. Fuck David Brooks.
Such a great short story!! It really touched a chord in me in high school
man, i started reading Ursula K Lee Guin when i was 14 or 15, to this day i can't think of an author who has changed more the way i perceive the world than her
I read it in a college ethics class and really liked it!
Her Earthsea Quartet is my first series in venturing into the Fantasy genre!
I love and missed her!
owensum t1_j3wiu3l wrote
FYI it's actually derived from a scene in The Brother Karamazov by Dostoevsky, in which he explores the doctrine of salvation, i.e., how one individual (Jesus) can suffer for all of mankind, and in the process derived an early form of utilitarianism. Le Guin had forgotten about this scene but was inspired by a short passage by the philosopher William James, which had been adapted from Brothers K.