Content note for non specific discussion of harm to a child, because this is about THAT story after all. Shortly after Le Guin's...
Content note for non specific discussion of harm to a child, because this is about THAT story after all.
Shortly after Le Guin’s death, I read (perhaps re-read - maybe I read it in 9th grade like most people) ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’. I feel like this is a story that most people 'know what it is about.’ Le Guin herself talked about how teachers used it to spark class discussions about utilitarianism, moral conundrums and individual rights versus the interests of the community.
We know the set up. Utopian city, whose prosperity depends upon the neglect and torture of one child (somehow). Everyone knows about the child. People go and see the child, most people accept the child’s existence, but some walk away from the city, never to return, and become the title characters.
But do we really know what this story is about? We could take the story as an allegory for how our prosperity depends upon exploitation, and 'the ones who walk away’ as stand-ins for brave dissenters. However I think that sells Omelas short. Our own nation is not a Utopia - we have not attained the perfection of happiness and harmony that Omelas has. Indeed, our nation has a lot of children treated just as badly for no reason at all - at least Omelas gets a Utopia out of it, supposedly. I say this not to defend LeGuin’s city on speech but to deflate the middle school self righteousness with which we applaud the title 'ones who walk away’ without asking ourselves about our own world and our place for n upholding it’s oppressions, which is typical of the way many dystopias are discussed.
But this reading actually ignores how the story unfolds. It is not a story, really. It has no plot - it is a description of the city. But not a straightforward description. The story would be best described as a negotiation, between the reader and the narrator. The narrator sets out a perfect city, and then asks the reader if they will accept it. And time and again, the narrator concedes that the reader does not accept it. The reader cannot accept happiness, contentment and peace. Until the narrator introduces the torture of a child. And then the reader accepts it. And we might object that Le Guin’s narrator is putting words in our mouth but we must acknowledge that this story is not famous because of the beautifully but simply rendered depictions of happiness above-ground in Omelas. It is famous because of the tortured child.
The people of Omelas do not put the child in the closet. The reader does. The people of Omelas do not trade a child for the good of the people, the reader does. And why? Because the reader cannot imagine things another way. Because the reader would dismiss a Utopia as fantasy unless it came at some terrible price, and then it becomes a profound moral problem. We can make this a literary commentary on Utopian and dystopian fiction, and God knows we have too much of the latter. How our sensibilities confuse pain and sometimes even cruelty for profundity, and how our imaginations are limited. But we can take this beyond literature. How do our limited imaginations constrain our ability to create a better world? How do they make us complicit in exploitation and abuse by making us accept them and dismiss better alternatives?
Le Guin was the greatest in no small part because she was always challenging us to see different possibilities for how we could live and who we could be. I think Omelas is a very stark lesson in the perils of a limited imagination.
(As another note, The negotiated framing is very similar to Plato’s Republic, which is often read as the original Utopia and yet is another example of how readers often disregard narrative frames to our detriment.)