The case for Omelas

On Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

Programming note: I’m trying weekly posts on Mondays due to a temporal shift in the Neogene.

Some short stories, like “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, come by their legend honestly, as scandalized readers of The New Yorker write in to complain, demand an explanation, or cancel their subscription. Other stories get immortal through a haze of reprinting in anthologies, like Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” You have to read Irving’s story as Stephen Akey reads it in the Republic of Letters: as a tale which tells how “time is not our element.” Every bit the weird American nightmare “The Lottery” is, “Rip Van Winkle” belies its apparent sedation in this or that Norton Critical Edition. I like both of those stories but have been thinking lately about legends and personal canons. While my own canon of favorite short stories tends to the fantastical (I’m tempted to include both Jackson and Irving), my list would have to be something more like:

“The Man Who Lost the Sea” by Theodore Sturgeon

“Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler

“The Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges

“Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville

“The Drowned Giant” by J.G. Ballard

“The Remission” by Mavis Gallant

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Kaleidoscope” by Ray Bradbury (or maybe “Frost and Fire”)

The only criterion for inclusion above is the unshakeable persistence with which I think about these stories. Where are the others that have left a permanent impression? Where’s James Joyce’s “The Dead”? Where’s Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet”? Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds”? Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”? Perhaps it’s redundant to have both Sturgeon and Bradbury on my list. “The Man Who Lost the Sea” revises Bradbury’s American boy melancholy and tunes it to a slangier and much more confusing hallucination. The story’s ambiguous affirmation of the fantasy of space travel is poignant precisely because the death of dreams is a moment of oneiric clarity, like waking up into a newer, higher, and more threatening Dream. Redundant, too, is the Ballard, since “The Drowned Giant” is a Borges story if Borges had been a medical student in the grip of a calm but queasy nightmare of autopsies. Still I can’t help myself. One shouldn’t help oneself, sometimes.

Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” sort of annoys me, or its legend and reputation do. Readers and critics get a little magnetized by its utopian-dystopian oscillations. The critic John Clute, for example, describes it as

a bitter, deft sf/fantasy/fairytale parable about the cost of the good life set in a modestly paradisal town rather like Salem, Oregon, a place whose good fortune depends on the unending misery of one small child.

Clute’s grammar is interesting. Do the people of Salem, Oregon, torment a single child to guarantee civic happiness? (Maybe they do, though apparently they keep it secret, as the citizens of Omelas do not.) Is Le Guin’s story really about the “cost of the good life”? Is it some kind of sermon? A modern retelling of Le Guin’s parable—or really a rejoinder to it—like N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” relies on a sense that Le Guin’s story hinges above all on the image of “the ones who walk away from Omelas.” It’s with this walking away, this exit strategy, that Jemisin’s own vision takes issue.

Which, fair enough. It’s right there in Le Guin’s title, though the element of sermon, however well intended or morally correct, feels even stronger in Jemisin’s version, as it implies that ethical purification is necessary to actually imagine a better world. In “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” the murderous violence quantum-mechanically associated with this purifying effort is intended to make the reader uncomfortable, but cleansing and purification—the forcible reshaping of minds, our own and others—borrows at least a little bit of the form if not the content from, say, the Khmer Rouge. Anyway, Jemisin’s story deserves a deeper engagement, and really I just wanted to get down in words a thought or two about “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

I can’t object to the inadequacies of Le Guin’s story, especially as a political fable. More than anything else, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” fascinates me because it seems to be about the same thing that Philip Gourevitch had in mind when he wondered, in a book on the Rwandan genocide, about “the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.” This necessity of imagining what is already real sounds like a nightmare, a duty, and an accursed imaginative act.

Jemisin knows that the emotional currency of her own story, as well as Le Guin’s original, consists in the strange verisimilitude of a purely imaginary city This verisimilitude takes shape not in the details but in the gestalt. Describing her utopia and its strange executioner-cum-social workers, Jemisin puts it best when she bluntly writes, “Does the possibility of harsh enforcement add enough realism?” Likewise, the narrator’s refrain in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is the question, “Do you believe it?” The feeling of Le Guin’s story revolves around whether or not Omelas appears credible. Can this city’s happiness be believed?

Take the horses, for example. The horses in Omelas wear a “halter without bit,” as if discipline had been replaced by joyful consent. The Omelans themselves feel joy above all. They celebrate. Their science, their art, and their leisure all flourish, free of the constraints of hunger, pain, and the pressure to survive in a commercial world. The Omelans are not, however, “bland utopians.” Here it feels like Le Guin is arguing with her own Aquarian age, the 1960s. The Omelans are “mature, intelligent, passionate adults.” Yet the narrator still despairs: “I wish I could convince you.” In pursuit of more persuasive details, the narrator adds that Omelas is not a medieval fantasy; Omelans ride trains and use washing machines. Religion exists, but ruling clerics do not. Sex in Omelas appears free of puritanical constraints and instead is practiced as a joyful delight: “One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.” Omelas is an argument, then, that banishes unsophisticated feel-good counterculture.

The famous catch, inspired, as Le Guin acknowledged, by a germ in William James and in Fyodor Dostoevsky, is that a single Omelan child lives a tormented life in a lightless, stinking room. The child is tortured by isolation and malnourishment, by sores, by its own excrement, by its half-minded but still powerful desire to be taken care of, to be loved, to be safe, to be good. Of course, it’s an arbitrary, contrived detail. Omelas does not exist, and the story’s description of the place lacks the social texture to place it in our own histories. The gambit of the story is that the revelation that Omelas depends, magically and artificially, upon a suffering child “earns,” so to speak, some realism for this fanciful utopia of passionate, mature individuals—in the minds of readers. That’s the implied theory advanced by “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”: that readers might believe somehow in the existence of this fantastical city once they grasp the torturing kernel at the heart of Omelan utopia. The cost gives it heft, makes it actual in the peculiar way fiction gets to “feel” actual.

If it appears to be the reader’s imagination that is so crucial in the description of Omelas, then this “fact” suggested by a piece of fiction obscures that the citizens of Omelas have their own diegetic and thoroughly imaginative relationship with the tormented child. The detail that always plagues me (the detail that does seem to make it real) consists in the simple note that the child in its filthy cell is “afraid of the mops” that lean in one corner of the awful room. Everyone in Omelas must know about the mops. They learn about the child after all. Young people especially but adults as well even visit the child, as though carrying out a rite of passage. One thinks of these visits as honorific viewings. But everyone in Omelas thinks of this tortured soul, perhaps especially those who’ve visited the room where the child lives. The story makes this all quite clear. It’s as if those in Omelas know they are in a story:

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they 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.

Everyone ponders, muses, or broods on the tormented child, this arbitrary detail on which the story depends as much as the imagined city of Omelas does. To imagine that tormented child upon which so much depends is, apparently, to imagine that everyone in Omelas rationalizes it, too. For to think about the child so thoroughly that it ruins one’s happiness “would be to let guilt within the walls [of Omelas] indeed.” And so, while the people of Omelas may not like to imagine the child in its horrible room, picturing this tormented soul has become a necessity to them. They tell themselves the child is “too imbecile to know any real joy,” were it to be freed. They tell themselves the child can never unlearn its fear and degradation. This is the cost that gives everything heft. All hinges on it, this thing pondered and mused on by all.

The necessity of imagining the child, the child’s situation, and the meaning of it all, is both ethical, for it foregrounds their recognition that Omelan happiness has been paid for (Omelas is not free), but also represents a significant emotional experience, even a compulsive one, like tonguing a wound on the inside of your cheek, except on a social-existential scale. Omelas is a society grown around its founding scar.

For the Omelans to feel no guilt in their culture of utopian happiness, the possibility of guilt has to exist. Guilt may be unheard of among them, but this can only be the case because every Omelan is shown the crime, so that they “understand.” And of course guilt does exist: the ones who walk away exercise the guilty option. They, perhaps alone among all those who live in Omelas, want to be innocent. Maybe this is their arrogance—the arrogant innocence—but it also implies the reason Le Guin couldn’t help but imagine them, too. Imagine, really, the seductiveness of that innocence.

I like Gourevitch’s phrasing quite a lot, “the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.” Some might rightly see in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” a contrived and even smug fantasy, but the substance of the story lives in its vision of vision: that compulsion to build castles in the air to superimpose over the real ones. To everything real, however, we have an imaginative relationship. Implicit in this, as constructed in Le Guin’s story, is the idea that there is no other way to see.