6.09 Le Guin 1: The Hideous Bargain

 

I Walk Away

In the spring of 2021, four years ago as I record this, I walked away from the public school system after 35 years as a teacher. I called it retirement, and I certainly qualified for it in every legal sense. But to be honest, I chose to leave earlier than I had originally planned–I was going to put in another five years at least. 

But I left. And so did a lot of teachers between the Winter of 2019 and the Fall of 2021, what we can call the Covid Years. I know we remember. For schools, it was a time of sudden online instruction, reduced student engagement and success, thousands of stories of emotional trauma, long term illness, and death. We teachers saw into the private homes of many of our students–often for the first time–and we often taught students who sat alongside their homebound parents, as well. So many teachers, faced with their own crises and having had no training in this new kind of job, left the profession.

This is not why I left. I was one of the few who had already been well-experienced in running online and hybrid-learning classrooms, having trained myself for almost 20 years in it by the time the pandemic came around. Managing the tech environments and the individual needs of students was a real fluster–most of you listening know what I mean, whether you were a teacher, student, or parent in that scenario–but it was little different from what I did most every day anyway: individualize instruction for students where I could, work and talk with them as they needed, accommodate in every place they needed. No one in our District challenged their experiences in their isolations, so overall we had adopted one of the best strategies, I believe, in addressing what we could.

So Covid is not why I left the profession early. I left because, as the pandemic and public opinion for health safety in schools began to wane, my district positioned itself to “get back to normal” as fast as it possibly could. 

We can blame it on justifiable fatigue. We could blame it on public pressure and what surrounding districts were doing. We could suggest, even, that this solution would be best for most students. Each of these was true and the arguments were, again, fully justified.

But.  But we had learned a great deal during those two years, as well. Not just about students and families and trauma and the education system’s suitability to quality online learning. We had learned, not always to our surprise, that some students–even many students–actually thrived in that online environment. Some students–even most students–actually were more successful when they could better control the pace of their studies. 

Now in theory and studies, we had always known this. A school culture of adolescents always produces some poor socialization which can amount to apathy and alienation in its more harmless forms and bullying, abuse, and violence in its more dangerous ones. Victims of such culture spend more time and emotional energy agonizing about their surroundings than anything an adult might say, especially those with emotional and learning challenges to start with. More, other students, left behind when their peers master foundation skills that they did not, falling behind when their fellow students move on, themselves disengage or become disruptive to the school, an unwitting act of protest and distress which schools too often mark as insubordination. But imagine what happens when we give them a little extra time to find success in those first skills. We can defuse so much of that.

These lessons and others became self-evident during Covid, and we learned, too, that the online tools we had could easily address the needs of such students. Let me say this again: the school systems themselves were learning how to educate better.

But by January 2021 the drive to get the kids “back to school,” whether as a drive for relief from screens or merely to take the kids off the hands of weary parents, was becoming clear. Along with others, I urged my district to use the time we had well–reflect on what we had learned and make changes in what we returned to. We had federal money we could spend for this–the pandemic support for schools, at least in Michigan, was solid. And we had time. Since we never had students onscreen for 7 hours a day, more like 3 or 4, there was room in our schedules to meet and talk, to plan and create, to revise and improve. No matter what else a pandemic was–horrifying, stupefying, mortifying–it was also a powerful opportunity to actually build change in what we had so long accepted as “givens” of an imperfect system. 

And, . . . none of it. The drive to return to normal, whatever it meant—a maladjusted, confining, homogenizing, mediocratizing, sometimes toxic institution that managed to create diploma-worthy young adults, sometimes despite itself–that drive to return, to get back to what we had taught ourselves to call “normal,” normalized, was far too great. 

And that—-that I could not bear. And so I walked away.

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and we begin a story today that will hit quite close to home.

 

A Moral Gauntlet

There’s more to my story, of course. But really, nothing as important to the overall decision than what I’ve described. 

I remember teaching my students through a plexiglass shield in my final semester, my eyes half-trained on the six or so students who returned and half on the computer screen where another 20 were less ready to commit. When my decision became public, students came to my classroom door in sadness, but we spoke only briefly at ten foot distances. 

This was all quite painful, too, but goodbyes always are. I held award ceremonies for my senior debaters that spring by driving to their homes and setting their awards on the front porches and then stepping back into the driveway for speeches so that they could step out to receive them. We streamed these for the other members.

But I want to focus on the choice. And I want to be really clear about this and where I am with it. I don’t regret making the choice: I did it thoughtfully and with the best calculation and intuition that I could. But what I am far less convinced of is whether it was the right choice. After all, I had swallowed my pride and moral principles for what a public school system was for 35 full years. Why leave now? What would it accomplish? Certainly nothing systemically has changed as a result of my departure. Nor did I raise some great banner saying something like “Individualized Instruction for All!” If even that was the principle motivation for it. Was I even sure?

And, somewhere in there, deeper still, was the accusation. You must have guessed; I wondered if I was merely being selfish. Take the pension and run. In some way, exercise my privilege, do what 80% of teachers could not, leave. Abandon the kids who would gain nothing new but the old system of schooling. Yeah, that accusation was definitely there; I made it to myself, and not a few others made it of me along the way, too.

And, to be honest, I hadn’t even thought of this as an Omelas dilemma until I started doing work on this season. I had not considered that, despite all my years of teaching writing and speaking and literature, I was seeing a real almost one-to-one parallel to what Le Guin and James envisioned. 

So here is where we are. Over the next several episodes, we’re about to undertake an extremely close and arduous take on Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and I wanted you all to know up front that I have a personal stake in this. And I’m going to bet that it won’t take too much soul-searching to discover that we all do. This is going to be arduous because it’s going to be hard work. We’re going much further into the text than I suspect many might expect, bringing in some other thinkers and writers who participate in our dialogue, . . . but it’s also hard work because we’re going to push our own buttons and moral principles fairly hard in the gut along the way. 

If you’re a teacher or discussion group leader, I want to begin with some advice, as well. We don’t dare merely intellectualize this story. We don’t dare abstract it. We can’t make it “safe for new readers of it” because it isn’t safe for ourselves. And to pretend we are not each personally invested in Le Guin’s message is to explicitly avoid what the text insists we discuss. But I get ahead of myself some, in that. You may not believe that, just yet. And that’s fine. I’ll make the case for that belief and more along the way.

If you’re someone who has already read the story, awesome. You’re here because you love the story and want to learn more. You’re here because it’s under your skin now, and you want to know what to do about that. I’m definitely with you, but as you can see from my opening confession, I am not at all sure I can free you from Le Guin here, nor should I.

And if you’ve made it this far, and you’re thinking: “I have never read this thing and I don’t really know what you’re talking about,” fear not. We will bring you to this place of risk and uncertainty, and I encourage you to read the story which is in the link in the Show Notes. I’m going to summarize it in a few minutes, anyway, but you’ll be far more satisfied taking the 10 minutes or so it requires to read it. 

And more, at this point in our intense series, I also want to confess that I myself don’t know exactly where I will be by the end of our talk. All futures are dark, but that does not mean that they must be bleak, merely not yet known. 

Let’s see. What else is there? I’m going to be providing some supplements for everyone along the way and afterwards, too. Some annotations, some additional reads, some ideas for more learning, things like that. I’ll let you know what’s available as it becomes important, but you’ll always find all of these on the Waywords Studio website. That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle!) dot com. That link is in the Show Notes, too.

And what will we be covering in our Moral Gauntlet? I call it this because I think of it as a kind of ritual running of the gauntlet, where the bravest readers take on each successive challenge no matter how painful, only to find themselves standing at its end, having passed through to a new kind of framework or five for thinking. 

What will we be covering? Well, we’ll see how the groundwork I’ve laid in the previous six warm-up episodes elevates itself as we apply them to the story. If you’ve missed those, feel free to run back a bit and catch up–we’ll wait! But if not, rest assured you can listen from here and get plenty to chew on.  

But we’ll also be looking more at William James and Fyodor Dostoevsky. We’ll be examining scapegoat archetypes and how they apply or do not, we’ll be wrestling with new thinkers like Rene Girard, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Georges Bataille, among others. We’ll address the core challenge Le Guin offers us, of course, but that’s what everyone talks about with this story. We’ll go further. I’ll introduce concepts like the Fictions of Happiness, the Psychologies of Complicity, and the Reader’s Labyrinth. We’ll talk about the realm of the unimaginable and–absolutely–counter-narratives to Le Guin, including the growingly famous N. K. Jemisin’s response and even one based in Eastern thought. 

And we’re going to start, you and I, right now.

 

 

Omelas: The Story

Now if you know the story well already, you can skip this chapter. But if you’d like a refresher, I’m going to take a couple of minutes and walk us through Le Guin’s thorny utopia.

Le Guin’s story takes place in a fantasy world, but that is a difficult call, nonetheless. It is fantasy only in that it is a made-up place. She tells us that it is the beginning of the Festival of Summer, and the coastal city of Omelas is celebrating. Workers, the aged, children, musicians, athletes–all are in celebration, heading to the annual horse race where even the horses are excited for the festivities. It is a joyous place.

Our narrator–in this case we will think of the narrator as Le Guin herself, for reasons which will be more clear later–our narrator asks a question: How can we understand the joy of the citizens of Omelas?  Our narrator takes over to talk about the problem of describing happy people. We as readers presume they’re simple, even naive or stupid. But, she says, the people of Omelas were not simple folk any more than you or I are. They simply live in a city which is happier, perhaps, than ours.

She imagines what they have and do not. They have no kings, and they have no slaves. She imagines very few laws at all, and no advertising, stock exchanges, secret police, or bombs. However, she says explicitly, they are not “bland utopians.” To think of them as simple because they are happy is to imagine that only pain is intellectual. She makes this clear early on, saying that our inability to describe happy people as complex people is a mark on our own prejudice: we imagine evil as interesting, but we fail–we treasonably fail–if we do not recognize that evil is dull and pain is boring. She worries that Omelas must seem like a fairy tale to us.

And so our narrator offers us some choices. She says that we–we readers–are allowed to make Omelas into any kind of city that we want, so long as no element of it is destructive. Would we rather it be an advanced society with floating lights and advanced medicine and trains? Sure. Would we want our people to be open to farmers markets and orgies, that’s fine, too. We can basically make it whatever we please so that we can hang on to this idea that they are good people with complex lives. 

Our narrator Le Guin offers a few ideas about how she imagines it. Open temples for worship, light non-destructive drug use, beer, and a feeling of triumph, not over another people with anything like soldiers, but a recognition that they celebrate a victory of life itself. 

Then she returns to the celebration and we watch everyone gather in anticipation for the horses, for the fanfares and food and everything else.

But our narrator is not satisfied. She asks the readers if we believe in it, the city and its joy. And of course, she suspects that we still see it as fantasy, not in the realm of the possible, just a fantasy.

And so she takes us one more place in Omelas, to a distant cellar or closet in a quiet building. She takes us inside this tiny room and its filth and despair, detailing its damp dirt floor, its claustrophobic dust and cobwebs, and the young child locked within it. The child is nearly ten years old, but looks younger for its malnourishment and suffering in the dark, naked and sitting in its own feces. Whatever mind it may once have had, it is now “feeble-minded;” it once cried for its mother, but now has forgotten and gone silent except for a kind of whining.. She calls the child an “it,” and describes how the child has long lost the sense of time in that isolating darkness. But then, occasionally, one or more visitors from the city of Omelas will arrive to stare at it for a brief time. Some will grow frightened or disgusted; some will even kick the child. 

Everyone in the town knows the child is there. Le Guin writes; everyone has learned it as early as age eight. “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.” Young people learning about the child become angry, outraged, feeling impotent to change anything. Because the terms are these: all depends on the suffering of this child. The rage and anxiety over this suffering child begin to fade over the weeks and years. 

Le Guin offers some idea of their complexity. They have compassion. It is somehow because of the child’s suffering that the greatness of their joy is felt. The acceptance of their own suffering in their helplessness is the source of their profound splendor. She asks the readers if we believe in Omelas now?

And then she ends the story with something she calls “incredible.” She says that sometimes, just sometimes, someone who sees the child and feels all of this does not return home; they just leave the city, walking alone. They walk into the darkness towards the mountains. They go to a place they cannot imagine, that may not exist at all, but they seem to know where they are going.

 

 

The Giant Omelas in the Room

And so right away, we understand what this story is about. There is seemingly no subtlety here; this isn’t like last Journey’s Andrew Marvell poem where we have to wrestle through its various traditions and political contexts and layers of narrator ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More to uncover ambiguous arguments for or against Christian faith. 

No, the elephant in the City of Omelas is dragged right out in front of us to look at baldly. Everything else–almost literally everything that might make a story a story–is placed in the far background, and Le Guin even offers us to change all of it. The only thing to talk about, it seems, is the dilemma of the utopia, the thorny price they pay and what we are to think about it.

This is the Hideous Bargain we’ve been talking about, what William James proposes in his essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.”  In most publications of the Le Guin story, the subtitle is “Variations on a theme by William James.” So even this connection is made explicit. Le Guin takes the problem in the James essay and makes it into our little utopia tale here. 

And, as we talked about a few episodes back now, in the episode “Otium and the Moral Philosopher,” James argues for a kind of “strenuous mood” that would seize hold of any human in such a situation, a moral outrage that usurps any sort of rationalization for such suffering. James offers us a nearly identical scenario and claims that we will, by and large, find ourselves in common compassion in rejecting any deal which permits an innocent to suffer. 

Now, James offered his argument as a direct contradiction to the utilitarian argument of the Suffering Child. Utilitarians, who make decisions to maximize happiness for all, might reason that one child’s suffering can hardly compare to the loss of happiness of an entire city of people, and so the trade-off, while sad, is completely valid. James would not have it. In his essay, he explains how our common moral outrage, a visceral emotional reaction, will be sufficient to move us to action. He might claim that finite needs would never triumph over infinite obligations. It’s one thing, he says, if a utilitarian makes such cold calculations about such matters on paper, but the pragmatist (his own brand of philosophy) works with the world in the world, and humans don’t behave this way. 

And this, then, is the Hideous Bargain that is put before all of us who read the story. Inevitably, immediately, we ask ourselves: Would I stay or would I walk away? That is the question that is debated for five or twenty minutes in thousands of classrooms every year, and then we move on to the next lesson. 

And, it seems, we might ask, What else are we to do with this? It’s a seemingly impossible question. Readers align themselves on one side or the other, perhaps unwittingly placing themselves as utilitarians or pragmatists (rarely having considered which position at length), and then they fairly stubbornly point fingers at the other side, labeling one side “evil” and the other “naive idealists.” Little gets resolved at the end of such debates, but it makes for some interesting fireworks.

I don’t mean to portray the exchange as worthless, though. After all, isn’t this basically the same thing Le Guin has done for us? She sets up the sides and then steps back and lets us “have at it.” Even so, so far as James argues for walking away in outrage, it seems, Le Guin is far less certain where the bulk of humanity will fall. Her utopia is based on people finally accepting the Suffering Child as a necessary evil for the greater social order, much as we might cull an over-sized deer herd or allow a certain percentage of population to remain homeless so long as the overall economy continues to move forward.

Such parallels will often come up in any reader debate on the story. We try to find other examples that make the situation more dire or the price more acceptable. “One baby? What if it was ten babies? Or two thousand?”  “Oh yeah, well, what if it wasn’t a kid in a closet like that, but the suffering was just a tooth cavity, or each kid in town had to do a month of ‘cellar service’ so no one had to suffer completely like that? Still going to object?”

The fact that readers in and out of classrooms continue to debate the question at all suggests that James’ philosophy is on unsteady ground. And that Le Guin both titles and ends her story with the ones who walk away suggests strongly where she stands, as a narrator in moral outrage. 

My point here is only that we can easily see that Le Guin’s story falls into the “Thorny Utopia” category of utopia fantasy fiction. It operates as an open allegory for any number of similar moral dilemmas we might and do encounter, and that inevitably we are disturbed enough by our open discussion of it that we are quietly glad to set the story aside, perhaps abandoning it to a closet or cellar until the next time we are forced to look at it. 

That said, let’s make sure, though, that we understand the conditions and consequences for what Le Guin offers.

 

Dilemmas False and True

There’s a seeming logic in dilemmas, isn’t there? The hero is compelled to make a choice, A or B. Logically, if we choose A, then B is off the table, as it were, and vice versa. Parents use this on their kids, teachers on their students, managers on employees. And, by and large, we are trained to accept the conditions. Accept the Suffering Child or Walk Away.

But in stories, isn’t it nearly always the villain who creates the dilemma for the hero? The ultimatum is a tool of manipulation, of closing a trap. And dilemmas always feel that way. In the slightly more clever tales, our hero thinks of a creative way out of the limited choices available. 

In my own Argumentation courses, I told my students that every time a dilemma is offered, recognize first that this is a tactic of control from an opponent, a limiting of the field so that either choice places him in a position of advantage; at the very least our dilemma-maker is in that position of control of our understanding. Therefore, the first approach to a presented dilemma is to reveal the blind spots.

I offered three general strategies in approaching a dilemma, and all of them effectively change this “game of control.” Let’s start by imagining a metaphor for our dilemma. We are caught by surprise and being charged by a wild bull. If we dodge to the left, we get gored by one of its horns, and if we dodge to the right, we get gored by the other. Either way, one of those horns is going to get us. We are, as they say, On the Horns of a Dilemma. What do we do?

Our first two counter strategies are named for this metaphor

• We can Take the Bull by the Horns. That is, faced with this threat of dangerous horns, demonstrate that the danger of one or both is not what we believe it to be.
  • If the lifeboat has room for one and there are two sinking it, we must choose one person to die. In this response, we might decisively weigh out the differences between the two candidates, finding one significantly younger and having a much longer life, or one suffering from heart disease and so more easily selected. Are the horns really equal here? Can one of them swim?
  • We are deciding between two new jobs or two new places to move. They each seem equal in cautionary warnings and potential opportunities. Different from the lifeboat, the bull here is in the acceptance of the risk. To take the bull by the horns, we would also have to break the job risks down against their potential rewards (maybe a pro/con list) but then also take a measure of our own capacity for different kinds of risks. The point is, for each of us, the future is always unknown, but no two choices are completely equal.
• The second strategy is to Slip Between the Horns of the Bull. In this case, we accept neither of the two choices offered but find a third or fourth or fifth alternative, the one we are not told about.
  • In the lifeboat situation, both survivors go into the water and share the lifeboat as a flotation device for swimming. 
  • In the matter of the jobs, why settle for the two offers? Set both aside to look for one that we are less anxious about. Or we ask for a short-term contract so we aren’t locked in for too long. Or set up another interview with each company to find out more.
• The final general strategy isn’t really about the bull–I suppose we can call it Charging Back at the Bull, if you want. It’s to turn the situation around 180 degrees: to create a counter-dilemma.
  • In the lifeboat scenario, we aren’t only choosing who will die. We are also choosing someone to live. Wow! We are so fortunate that one of us will make it!
  •  In the case of the new jobs or home, no matter what we choose, we are entering an exciting adventure of new experiences and risk, not apprehension.

So, should we apply these strategies to Omelas? Of course we could, and many readers try to. The utilitarian acceptance of the suffering child against the happiness of many is exactly taking the bull by the horns. But then again, so is the pragmatist’s response of rejecting it. Each of these sees the scenario offered as unequal.

Let me skip to the counter-dilemma briefly, because sometimes a response strategy just doesn’t seem to work. I think here is a case. We could argue, I suppose, that no matter what we do, someone ends up happier, but these are not wholly true–the happiness of the Omelas citizens is already compromised, so leaving the child there and walking away doesn’t make anyone happier. Staying and accepting ourselves doesn’t, either. More, there is no guarantee that this now feeble-witted child can ever find a healthy emotional condition again: we can just imagine the trauma work that will have to be done. This particular approach feels weak to me.

But that third choice one, the slipping between the horns, is awfully tempting, isn’t it? We simply dislike both options and look for another way out. Le Guin heads most of these off: she makes clear that saving the child, even showing the smallest compassion for the child, will break “the terms,” whatever those exactly are and with whom (but oh, we’ll get to that soon enough). So no Secret Night Operations or anything like that. And Whistle-Blowing on the whole thing won’t work because the Suffering Child is well-known and accepted already. We could try staging a debate for policy change, organizing those who walk away, or offer ourselves to take the place of the child. All of these and more are avenues readers (and answering writers) have tried before. 

And so, now, having offered us all these approaches and tests for taking on Le Guin’s dilemma, I’m going to say that these approaches, every one of them, are a violation of the formal requirements of the Omelas narrative.

To explain, remember that this is a fantasy world, a utopia story, an allegorical fable of sorts. If this were a real-world scenario of 10,000 variables, or even a more realistic fictional story, we would be on solid ground to take the dilemma on in just the ways I’ve outlined. Every time I talk about the Horns of the Bull, I’m speaking a metaphor, a fantastic whittling down of everything a dilemma is into this one simple image. The moment we take that metaphor and demand “real-life examples” for it, we’re all about taking them apart with any of the counter strategies. And we should.

But fantasy and fable, allegory, don’t work this way. They are intentional fabrications designed to compel us to confront something we do not wish to. Every one of the counter-methods I offered here works to escape that fundamental confrontation. It’s like playing a “Would You Rather” game and answering “I don’t want to” to every challenge. No. The point of the game rules is not to avoid the question: its power (and entertainment) comes from the compulsion to answer it. 

 

Narrative as Moral Test

And why is this compulsion so critical to understanding our story? Because that is its very point, its theme, exposing a social, ethical, moral challenge that we would rather not address. Therefore, using a dilemma escape strategy is openly putting the story back in the drawer, brazenly refusing to discuss or examine its premises. It’s refusing to read the literature.

I described utopia before as most often a thought experiment, what Tom Moylan calls “critical utopias.” Their very function is to compel our thinking about what they reveal, of our values. For Moylan, the critical utopia admits that there are no single future visions of utopia possible, that keeping hope for them alive remains critical for our moral compass anyway, but that we are left then to engage directly with their flaws and inconsistencies. Critical utopias literally do not have answers nor do they want them. Ending the discussion with some kind of conclusion is the opposite of their goal. What is the goal of the utopia? As I described in our last episode, to prevent escapism, to disallow complacency, to wrestle us constantly out of our lazy thinking, to stay under our skin and work on us. And why? Because somehow, we are ourselves complicit in the utopia problem posed.

Complicit? Responsible? Accountable? How is that possible? To answer that for now, I offer this as evidence: our very desire to “answer” Le Guin’s dilemma and put the story away quickly for its unpleasantness is indicative of our witnessing ourselves in it a little too closely. Le Guin isn’t writing about Omelas, of course: she’s writing about us, right now. This is what we are doing. We’ve just, like the people of Omelas, rationalized our way to happiness, or at least normalized contentment with it.

In one of Le Guin’s many meetings about this book decades after she wrote it, she put the problem far more plainly. Perhaps a bit frustrated with decades of readers who kept trying to escape her metaphor, she added another. She said that the suffering child in her story was quote “the turd in the punchbowl.”

Wow.

Let’s just –  let’s just pause there for a moment.  “The turd in the punchbowl.” Forget my charging bull. Go ahead and let that image form for you. . . . 

Now let’s go enjoy the party.

 

Her Party, Her Rules: Scapegoats and Archetypes

We need to talk a bit more about the party we’re trapped in, then. It’s like most parties, an air of celebration–for what we are not always sure–and it is filled with people eating and drinking, there is likely music, and everyone is having a good time, or at least seeming to. There is likely a number of miscues and miscommunications through the evening, some drama and melodrama rippling through from time to time, some wine is spilled and stains some upholstery a bit, but the host will soon clean it up with the latest convenient brand-name spray can. And there is a “turd in the punchbowl” that everyone has seen but no one is talking about.

Le Guin’s party, on her own terms, has viciously made the invisible deniable a visible undeniable. 

How long before that smile cracks completely?

This, like the Summer Festival in Omelas that involves every citizen and those from nearby towns, that has the latest features and conveniences, the most wholesome of joys, is also a metaphor, and it’s a festival or party we’ve attended many times. In fact, we keep coming back to it.

As a society, we’ve been to the party by William James who spoke directly of it–and you may say, “Well, I haven’t been there, I haven’t even heard of his essay until this podcast,” but James’s work was popular in his day and it feeds so much of our contemporary talk about pragmatism and faith that we’ve almost made it all a generic name like kleenex and forgotten about it. 

Dostoevsky, too, held a huge party almost exactly like it, though his turd, if I may be crude, sits in the middle of God’s punchbowl and his arguments test the theodicy–the excusing of the Cosmic–of our very creation and redemption. In other words, we might agree that a human slipped it there in a human party, but that kind of suffering is simply not how God works, so says Aloysha. In God’s plan, the Scapegoat is willing to accept the terms. We’ll come back to both of these writers before we’re done.

But not just them. I’ve already offered you with a few others. 

Langston Hughes, in his poem “Let America Be America Again” implicitly and explicitly lists all the suffering that we have allowed to continue. And he calls on us all to restore its idealism. What he does not do, however, is frame this as a moral choice. Easily enough, I can agree with him with little risk: just repost and “heart” the poem on Insta.

Stephen King, in Storm of the Century, exposes a nearly identical scenario and locks us into the island town party. The only difference is that his party is definitely a horror theme, and we are made far less safe for the choice we make. 

Most of us know the Shirley Jackson story “The Lottery,” where (*spoilers*) a town ritually elects a family to stone to death, and the participants can’t believe other towns are starting to give up the practice.

And not just here. Of course, never just here. We’ve, all of us, always attended the party.

French historian and philosopher Rene Girard helps us understand the nature of our circumstances. He describes the violent foundations of our human culture as a starting point for understanding our rituals and how we hold that violence in check. 

First, we must understand the term scapegoat, an idea which comes first perhaps from the Old Testament book of Leviticus 16: the chief Jewish clergyman would symbolically lay all of the sins of a people upon a goat and then send it out into the wilderness to be eaten. Obviously, the goat had done nothing to deserve just punishment, but the point here is also a symbolic transference, a placing of our own burdens and ills, our tendencies to violence or injustice, upon another. Cities are founded upon sacrifices: Cain slays Abel; Romulus slays Remus; great enterprises and wars begin with sacrifices to the gods. 

For Girard, this concept–the scapegoating of others, blaming or holding an innocent accountable for the faults of others, for expediency or convenience–is central to how our current societies function. He calls this foundation the “victimage mechanism.” It’s almost like society functions like a machine for Girard–at least psychologically–and all of our cultural institutions and practices, including religion and law, are founded in violence upon a scapegoat. When the machine operates correctly, Girard says, life comes out of death, our communities grow more unified and we prosper, maintain our peaceful natures. 

It sounds ghastly, because it really is. And there is a lot more to say about Girard–and we will–but here is his key point for us today: in order for the party to function, in order for us to get along and keep moving forward, is that we never fully recognize or acknowledge what we are doing. The entire process is unconscious; so long as we benefit, we do not question.

And here is Le Guin. Her party has a punchbowl which is hard to ignore. In other discussions of the story, she made it far more clear even still. She described the idea of this story as quote “this psychomyth, this scapegoat.”

In Omelas, however, Le Guin is not on board with Girard completely, is she? My suspicion is that Omelas is the kind of story Girard would admire, because it asks us to hold ourselves to account. The New Testament makes the Scapegoat metaphor public. And the citizens of Omelas, non-Christians, know the bargain that they have embraced, and they carry on anyway. And now we readers see it out in the open, too. There is no escaping.

 

So What Do We Do?

As I said, we’ve only just opened the door on our story so far, and I wanted today to outline the nature of Le Guin’s provocation and some approaches readers typically take which work to evade its challenge. 

But so far, we know that to read and appreciate Le Guin’s story, we absolutely must confront the terms of our choices, and to do that we have to understand them. And we must accept that we will not ever pause the discussion in full satisfaction.

I can never expect, perhaps, that I will fully understand all the factors which contributed to my decision to leave public school teaching when I did, or if my rationale for it was valid, but Le Guin is offering me some challenges, and some choices that themselves don’t satisfy. She has me wondering if and what I could possibly have changed.  

But we’re not there, yet. We haven’t dug into this “deal” or trade-off yet, and we haven’t done much more than point the finger at Omelas citizens for rolling with it so easily. We do have some opening concepts to consider, and for anyone addressing this story, they’re good places to start. We might frame them as questions:

• Can we sketch out this bargain? What parts of it are most hideous? Which are most tolerable? Questions like these help us as readers invest more fully in what is on the page before us and give us a chance to clarify our own values that we bring to bear. Jumping to the “Would you walk away?” question glosses over the hard work that we have. We’re all ready to speak a hypothetical ideal without looking at ourselves too closely.
• If scapegoating is a transference of sin upon an innocent, how is this story about scapegoating? What other instances of scapegoating have we witnessed in society? Are those examples and this story parallels or doesn’t the analogy fit?
• Speculate: What does ‘walking away’ look like in such a scene? How does doing that answer the hideous bargain? How does staying answer it?
• Is this story what Le Guin says: “a turd in a punch bowl”?
• If we understand the dilemma Le Guin has created, what do we need the rest of the story for? 

We’re going to take on some of these questions ourselves next. We have to consider more carefully our own roles as readers here. 

Next week, we consider the weight of happiness, the architecture of complicity, the cost of otium, or–in other words–the privilege to even decide. 

Go have some coffee, sit and enjoy the end of a summer, think a bit about how you got that chair and java, and after you do, 

Go read something.

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonuses, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

 

Bibliography

Herzog, Annabel. “Dilemmas of Political Agency and Sovereignty: The Omelian Allegory.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 38, no. 4, Jul. 2021, pp. 71–88. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420967436.

Knapp, Shoshana. “The Morality of Creation: Dostoevsky and William James in Le Guin’s ‘Omelas.’” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 15, no. 1, Winter 1985, pp. 75–81, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225113.

Langbauer, Laurie. “Ethics and Theory: Suffering Children in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Le Guin.” ELH, vol. 75, no. 1, Mar. 2008, pp. 89–108. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2008.0005.

Wyman, Sarah. “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, vol. 25, no. 4, Oct. 2012, pp. 228–32. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2012.720854.