The Child Doesn't Exist
Dec. 5th, 2023 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretA somewhat midrashic take on "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", originally shared at the Philcon panel on Omelas.
The first two pages of the story are about a festival celebration taking place in the utopian city of Omelas, where everyone felt joy. "Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?" This is LeGuin's purported narrative struggle in these first two pages, how to describe the joy in a way that is consistent with the reality, and which her readers will believe. Who are her readers? They are clearly people who are familiar with Western utopian/dystopian literature, because they are by nature skeptical of her descriptive attempts.
To those who think she is referring to the Coming of Age in Samoa-tradition of romanticized pre-Modern isolated civilizations who live simple, happy lives, she dismisses them by suggesting that Omelas is a technological civilization, perhaps even more advanced than our own.
To those who simply think that any happy civilization is a superficial happiness, she writes "The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid... 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."
After spending two pages struggling with the problem of describing a true Utopian happiness, she appears to give up. "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing." Then she describes that which is most famous about the story, not the festival celebration descriptions and not the joy, but the child who lives in a basement and is neglected, mocked and tormented, and upon whose existence the joy of Omelas purportedly depends.
And after establishing all the details of this child, LeGuin asks "Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible?"
And so I think it is plausible that the child does not exist in Omelas. The child is, Watsonianly, a rhetorical tool and a hypothetical designed by LeGuin's narrator to demonstrate that because we live in a society where many children suffer so that some may be happy and safe, we expect suffering. We cannot imagine a real utopia. This is why the description of the child is vague- LeGuin's narrator wavers on where the basement is located, what exactly is done to the child. She is unclear on how the child ensures the happiness. This is because she's pointing out that we so expect that any utopia must have a catch, that the only way we will believe in Omelas is if she artificially grafts a catch onto it. And LeGuin is trying to say, until we can actually imagine a real utopia that isn't secretly dystopic, we will never be able to transform our society into a utopia. As long as we have to invent and imagine a child suffering in order to believe in the happiness of Omelas, we will never get there.
And this explicates the last lines, and the title. "They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all."
LeGuin is describing people who have found the imagination and the vocabulary to live in a city that is less imaginable to us, a city where not even one child needs to suffer. A city so perfected that she cannot imagine it herself. It's not that they walk away because they cannot stomach the harm done to the child, that is never the claim that LeGuin makes. They walk away because they can no longer see the child. That's where the ones who walk away from Omelas walk off to.
The first two pages of the story are about a festival celebration taking place in the utopian city of Omelas, where everyone felt joy. "Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?" This is LeGuin's purported narrative struggle in these first two pages, how to describe the joy in a way that is consistent with the reality, and which her readers will believe. Who are her readers? They are clearly people who are familiar with Western utopian/dystopian literature, because they are by nature skeptical of her descriptive attempts.
To those who think she is referring to the Coming of Age in Samoa-tradition of romanticized pre-Modern isolated civilizations who live simple, happy lives, she dismisses them by suggesting that Omelas is a technological civilization, perhaps even more advanced than our own.
To those who simply think that any happy civilization is a superficial happiness, she writes "The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid... 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."
After spending two pages struggling with the problem of describing a true Utopian happiness, she appears to give up. "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing." Then she describes that which is most famous about the story, not the festival celebration descriptions and not the joy, but the child who lives in a basement and is neglected, mocked and tormented, and upon whose existence the joy of Omelas purportedly depends.
And after establishing all the details of this child, LeGuin asks "Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible?"
And so I think it is plausible that the child does not exist in Omelas. The child is, Watsonianly, a rhetorical tool and a hypothetical designed by LeGuin's narrator to demonstrate that because we live in a society where many children suffer so that some may be happy and safe, we expect suffering. We cannot imagine a real utopia. This is why the description of the child is vague- LeGuin's narrator wavers on where the basement is located, what exactly is done to the child. She is unclear on how the child ensures the happiness. This is because she's pointing out that we so expect that any utopia must have a catch, that the only way we will believe in Omelas is if she artificially grafts a catch onto it. And LeGuin is trying to say, until we can actually imagine a real utopia that isn't secretly dystopic, we will never be able to transform our society into a utopia. As long as we have to invent and imagine a child suffering in order to believe in the happiness of Omelas, we will never get there.
And this explicates the last lines, and the title. "They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all."
LeGuin is describing people who have found the imagination and the vocabulary to live in a city that is less imaginable to us, a city where not even one child needs to suffer. A city so perfected that she cannot imagine it herself. It's not that they walk away because they cannot stomach the harm done to the child, that is never the claim that LeGuin makes. They walk away because they can no longer see the child. That's where the ones who walk away from Omelas walk off to.
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