ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and
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Reading Through Fictions in Ursula Le Guin's “The
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Sarah Wyman
To cite this article: Sarah Wyman (2012) Reading Through Fictions in Ursula Le Guin's “The Ones
Who Walk Away from Omelas”, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews,
25:4, 228-232, DOI: 10.1080/0895769X.2012.720854
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2012.720854
Published online: 08 Nov 2012.
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Date: 08 November 2017, At: 15:04
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews,
Vol. 25, No. 4, 228–232, 2012
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0895-769X print / 1940-3364 online
DOI: 10.1080/0895769X.2012.720854
S ARAH W YMAN
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State University of New York, New Paltz
Reading Through Fictions in Ursula Le Guin’s
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Variations on a Theme by William James),”
Ursula Le Guin presents a utopia that turns out to be an imperfect, even nightmarish dystopia. The
tension between these two heaven-and-hell extremes could be summed up in a pull between the
verbs to seem and to be. A carefree life that seems right, pleasing, or otherwise justified turns out to
be founded on injustice and is ultimately untenable for some of its citizens. Ethical confusion arises
both within the fictional world of the story and in reconciling that textual space with the real-world
counterpart that the author evokes in her introduction.
Le Guin considers the story an allegory of contemporary American culture inspired by the
“shock of recognition” she experienced upon reading this passage from William James:
If the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which [ . . . ] millions [should be] 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 [sic] [ . . . ] 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? (188)
Le Guin contends that in this passage, “The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be
better stated” (275). In the story, a community inhabits a wonderful, fairy tale world free of illness,
anxiety, and social strife. The Omalasians subscribe to a social contract contingent on the exploitation of one child to ensure the happiness of all other citizens. Pitting brute reality against fiction’s
capacity to conjure illusory solutions, the author, a communal utopian,1 offers no easy answers.
Several critics have mistakenly argued that Le Guin supports the noncompliance of those who walk
away.2 Neither Le Guin nor James, however, would necessarily applaud the members who choose
to leave this community.
While the choice to walk away from the hideous bargain Le Guin puts forth may seem correct at first, a more careful reading suggests that both Le Guin and James would elect to stay in
Omelas, imperfect as it turns out to be. Each would likely insist on a dynamic ethical system existing and evolving among and dependent upon all community members. To withdraw, then, from this
fellowship would be comparable to betraying the social contract and abdicating responsibility for
the child’s lot. Rather than offering a utilitarian excuse—the good of the many outweighs the good
of the one—they would likely place emphasis on the incarcerated lost soul, who stands simultaneously within and without the society. Following Immanuel Kant, each would probably highlight
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Reading Through Fictions in Ursula Le Guin
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the child’s autonomy as a sentient being rather than a necessary fact or consequence of a nefarious
contract. Instead of dallying with escapist fantasies, Le Guin engages the utopian trope in order to
put forth a political statement that becomes increasingly clear as the story evolves.3
A key aspect of this story and a clue to Le Guin’s actual opinion on the matter manifests in the
way the fiction itself contrives to hold the reader accountable as a virtual Omalasian, fully aware of
parallels between the imaginary land and contemporary Western capitalist society. The reader cannot
not participate in the fiction, just as each citizen cannot not participate in Omelas’ egregious social
contract. Le Guin creates a narrator who acts as a Jamesean “judicial investigator,” inviting the reader
to wrestle with the moral dilemma presented while roping him/her into a terribly uncomfortable
position by using several rhetorical tactics. The author sets up dichotomous structural tensions in
order to lure the reader into making a choice that she herself refuses to make overtly. By involving
the reader in the construction of the fantasy world, she implicates him/her in the decision acted
out by the characters, both those who stay and those who leave. “Perhaps it would be best if you
imagined it as your own fancy bids [ . . . ] for certainly I cannot suit you all” declares the narrator
(278). So Omelas becomes in this respect a relative utopia, perfectly modeled in the mind of each
reader. The lushness of the language and the rhetorical power of the telling augment the seduction
of this collaborative relationship between narrator and reader.
Le Guin starts us off in a highly poetic mode. She foregrounds the neat tension that will be the
central dilemma of the story by titling it with a “walk [ing] from,” then starting the narration with a
“[coming] to.” Who will stay and who will leave? The main problem of the tale has already subtly
evidenced itself. She has stylized her text so that we are far from the realm of standard English
language. Instead, our eyes and minds rest on the page where she foregrounds the materiality of
the language itself.4 The breathless, long lines of the first paragraph mimic the festival parade the
words describe. Le Guin alliterates the sounds of the words: “mauve and grey, grave” (276), echoing
the sonic features with a chiastic au-gr / gr-a flip. She employs the assonance of the long i-sound
in the line, “high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights” (277). The horses themselves are
personified as the scene springs to life.
Next, the narrator makes two moves that jerk the reader out of traditional fairy tale mode,
waking us from the lull of gorgeous language. First, she takes a meta-textual (or meta-discursive)
turn in which the text calls attention to its own project: telling a story. The narrative voice seems to
stand outside the text and comment on it, reflexively. She problematizes her own tale-telling goal by
questioning the effort of expression itself: “How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens
of Omelas? [ . . . ]. I wish I could describe it better” (277–78). This clumsy gesture comes across as
ironic, following on the heels of the first paragraph’s masterful display of technical skill in crafting a
story. The narrative voice’s move to divest herself of authority and responsibility for defining Omelas
further implicates the reader in completing the construction of this anti-utopia.
In a second important turn, the narrator addresses the reader directly. Thus, the reader is implicated or caught up in the story, inhabiting Omelas as well. Once she starts generalizing about our
“bad habit,” we become a bit uncomfortable, without a voice of our own within the text with which
to explain or defend ourselves. We do not want to accept her definition of us: “we have a bad
habit [. . .] of considering happiness as something rather stupid” (278).5 Echoing the philosophy of
Hannah Arendt, she dismantles the very artistry she just demonstrated: “This is the treason of the
artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain” (278). We begin to
understand that our delicious picture of the city of Omelas actually disguises a dirty secret, necessary
to its survival. We eagerly let ourselves be drawn into the initial festivities, only to find ourselves
abruptly confronted with a serious moral dilemma.
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The androgynous, incarcerated child serves as a trope of suffering, a ritual sacrifice, bearing a
horrifying burden for the sake of its fellow citizens’ joy.6 The child, held captive under unspeakable
circumstances in an ambiguously public/private space, serves as a scapegoat for the town.7 Looking
at the child, Jerre Collins has suggested an allusion to the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 52.13–53.12,
granted redemption through resurrection.8 The story, however, offers no hope of transcendence nor
justification for the child’s martyrdom. Linda Simon, a careful reader of William James, calls the
incarceration of the child, “a symbol of the community’s faith” (97). Thus, the choice to stay trumps
the option to repudiate one’s faith and leave.
The display of suffering when mediated by art raises important questions. The ethical problems
belong to the artist and reader as reflector or consumer rather than the work itself as exploitive force.
Laurie Langbauer emphasizes the moral consequences of using the trope of the suffering child.9
She holds us as readers, not to our level of sympathy for the child, but rather confronts us with
“the ethical imperative that we own up to our part in such constructions” (104), whether or not the
narrator so skillfully manipulates us into the fabrication of the image as does Le Guin. Although I
contend that morality exists in the actions of sentient beings rather than in fictions, I agree with her
imperative, as Le Guin probably would, that we all have a price to pay for our gaze, for our visual
consumption of the aesthetically rendered and actively tormented child.
Neither choice, to stay or to leave, is without serious consequences, for even those who leave
have not escaped responsibility for what goes on in the basement. To refuse to participate in this
outrage by partaking in the happiness it engenders does not solve the material situation of the suffering child. It ensures neither his/her comfort nor release. To leave is ironically to not vote, to
not act. In James’s terms, “there is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should
seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest
total universe of good which we can see” (iv). Even James’s secularization of this idea, despite his
somewhat cheeky biblical diction, depends on citizens who are able to recognize the morally good
and on their motivation to act on their convictions. As Simon points out, James assumes all humans,
considering the child’s plight, would share an innate feeling of revulsion that comes not from past
experience but from a feeling of human connection (91). In fact, several critics have pointed out the
Omalasians’ bad faith suggested by the weak justifications put forth for the child’s incarceration,
such as, “it is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy” (283). Whether or not people act
predictably, James’s real emphasis falls on the imperative of living in a communal way such that an
ethical system can continuously develop. For when an individual acts alone, “subject to no higher
judge,” he or she “inhabits a moral solitude” (ii) equivalent to a loss of faith in one another. For
James, living outside society proves impossible.
Granted, more than one individual has left Omelas, so a new community could conceivably
establish itself elsewhere. Le Guin refers to the Ones, stressing their plurality and individuality at
once. Collins submits that the real utopia can be defined by its very difference from Omelas (5). Yet,
why should this uncharted realm be any better at all? Collins’s rhetorical trick remains unconvincing.
He graphs a resurrection theodicity onto the story in order to read leaving as a rebirth rather than the
entry into the void it more convincingly represents. Simon, in contrast, calls the choice to leave “not
a striking out or a protesting against an unsupportable reality, but a willingness to be annihilated.
[. . .] Leaving Omelas means a descent into anomie and chaos” (97). One can, indeed, leave the
compelling theological or ethical platforms of both Collins and Simon behind to simply insist on the
negative space of not-Omelas (the anti-anti-utopia) as symbolic of the community’s betrayal.
Utopias of any stripe exist as fictions, and like James’s nonsentient facts or consequences cannot, then, be ethical entities in themselves. These worlds of varying perfection can only seem, not
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be. Yet, they can reflect or express phenomena parallel to real-world situations and potentialities. Le
Guin’s anti-utopia seems, by its very imperfection, to approach our world more closely. The highly
aestheticized nature of her essay, its overt constructedness, should alert the reader to the deceptive
enticements of art, the seduction of beauty, the distance between fiction and reality. The temptation
to locate the story’s treachery in the fiction itself rather than in the real world to which it corresponds parallels the mistaken characters’ urge to leave Omelas altogether. While the impulse to flee
this tainted paradise, this fictive realm, may be revolutionary in itself, the act of going, when read
against James’s Pragmatic philosophy, the traces of Le Guin’s creative act, and their common belief
in communal ethics, cannot be considered the morally sound choice.
Notes
1 Here,
I rely upon Michael Cummings’s distinction between a political radical and a communal utopian who, rather
than seeking to transform society, tries “to build an ideal microcosm within a flawed society” (147). Yet Le Guin’s attempt
transpires within a fictional world that includes distinctly flawed people—suspicious of joy—and results in an ultimately
anti-utopian message.
2 Brandt, Knapp, and Collins each argue that Le Guin would support leaving Omelas. This interpretation does not square
with James’s notion of a flexible ethical code existing within a community of sentient beings.
3 Peter Fitting calls on Fredric Jameson to support his point that utopian paradigms, once thought “to divert attention
and action away from concrete political action” (24), have become instead, a powerful means of asserting the possibility of
alternate societal models.
4 For a stylistic study of lexical opposition in Le Guin’s story, see Trimarco.
5 With this satirical commentary on human cynicism, the anti-utopian flair of the story makes itself known. Nan Bowman
Albinski describes its orientation as one that “mocks the notion of human perfectibility, and [ . . . ] finds in the very irrationality and resilience of our nature a safeguard against the straitjacket of conformity” (11–12). Again, the reader’s resistance
plays into fluctuations in distance between acceptance/rejection of the social contract within the story and between the reader
and the story itself, as he or she negotiates an ethical conclusion.
6 Bruce Brandt has identified two additional antecedents for Le Guin’s child. First, there is the abused five-year-old girl
featured in the last argument between Ivan and Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Second, there is Bvalltu’s
hypothesis in Olaf Stapledon’s Starmaker: “If he saved all the worlds, but tormented just one man, would you forgive him? Or
if he was a little harsh only to one stupid child?” (51). Along with Dostoevsky, Laurie Langbauer adds Dickens’s allegorical
children “Ignorance,” “Want,” and “Doom” from A Christmas Carol.
7 Le Guin refers to this scapegoat trope as a “psychomyth,” ushering in the notion of communally held descriptors
and moral directives. She explains in “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction” that “when the genuine myth rises into
consciousness th[is] is always the message[:] You must change your life.” For further discussion of Le Guin’s connection
between myth and ethics, see “The Child and the Shadow” as well as Rebecca Adams’ commentary.
8 Collins thus claims that a “redemption-theodicity” undermines the “capitalist exploitation theodicity” and justifies the
choice to leave Omelas.
9 As Langbauer points out, even the scholar’s critique of the use of children, “repeat(s) the treatment that we also
analyze” (91).
Works Cited
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and ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’ ” Utopian Studies 2.1–2 (1991): 35–48. Print.
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Gorman Beauchamp, Kenneth Roemer, and Nicholas Smith. Latham: UP of America, 1987: 11–22. Print.
Brandt, Bruce. “Two Additional Antecedents for Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’ ” ANQ 16.3
(June 2003): 51–56. Print.
Collins, Jerre. “Leaving Omelas: Questions of Faith and Understanding.” Studies in Short Fiction 27.4 (Sept 1990): 525–35.
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