Archives and Feelings

Walk Into the Darkness (And Do Not Come Back)

Megha Baikadi

November 19, 2013

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Megha Baikadi

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Dr Lothian

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Engl 985

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 11/19/2013

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0  

Walk Into the Darkness (And Do Not Come Back)

Discussion – Ursula Leguin’s The Ones That Walk Away From Omelas

“What except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? (James, qtd in Leguin 251)

10.  Narrative style. Who is this person, and what are they doing here?  There is a way in which the narration is very active, very deliberate, and very interesting.  Why do you think Leguin does this? What do we get out of it?

“ I wish I could Convince you…Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.” 253

“One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.  But what else should there be?  I thought at first that there were no drugs, but that is puritanical” 254

9.  So, what do you think about the metawriting?  Those sections in the beginning, where citation (and lack thereof), and philosophy, and psychomyth collide?  Why do you think the story is framed this way?  What do we get out of it, or think should come from it?

“Several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James.  The fact is, I haven’t been able to re-read Dostoyevsky…I’d simply forgotten he used the idea.” 251

8. Institutions.  Leguin deliberately omits government, and religion of any organized kind, and social organization as a larger concept.  So is this city without organizations?  What do we think of this analysis that these practices always lead to divisions and unhappiness?  And what takes their place in Omelas?

“I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect they were singluarly few.  As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also go on without the stock exchange, the advertisenment, the secret police, and the bomb.” 254

7.  The nature of Omelas, and the “ideal” Leguin seems to be building on, is very pastoral.  There is the emphasis on the Green Fields and the Farmer’s Market, the equality or even exaltation of animals in the equestrian race.  Do we agree with this vision of Leguin’s utopia? And, on a side note, some of that ideal tends towards the ornate (decorations and descriptions) and some more to the extremes of the natural, like the lack of clothing in places.  Is there anything to say about it?

“Where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, excercised their restive horses before the race. 253

“and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmer’s Market.” 255

6.  The narrative discussion of the citizens, next.  How do we read them?  How do we take the narrator’s defense of them, their happiness which is not simple, their joys which are not corrupting, their lives which (we are told) are not terrible?

“Joyous!  How is one to tell about joy?  How describe the citizens of Omelas?  They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy.” 253

“Yet I repeat these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utiopians.  They were not less complex than us.” 254

5.  And now we reach the child in the closet.  What can we say about this, is there anything?  How about the sharp and abrupt contrast of the two states, the citizens and the closet, the child above and below?

“The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.  The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room.  In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl.  It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten…the door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes – the child has no understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there.” 257

4.  What do you think of the walking away?  Is it a way out?  Is it taking a stand, or refusing to take one?  Does it help, or not so much, to be utterly unable to describe where they might be going or why?

“Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains.  They go on.  They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.  The place they go is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness.” 259

3. Ahmed.  How does the story of Omelas go with last week’s readings? The happiness and trade of happiness, and particular kind of happiness script Leguin is writing and we are reading?  What can we do with that?

“The trouble is we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering Happiness rather stupid.  Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting…we have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas?” 254

2. Povinelli.  Ok, so what about the child in the broom closet, how does she connect to the theories of various liberalisms and social projects and the ideas about the future?  How do we?

“The happiness of citizens of Omelas is substantially within the small child’s unhappiness; their well-being is part of a larger mode of corporeal embodiment in which her carnal misery is a vital organ… the ethical imperative is not to put oneself in the child’s place, nor is it to experience the anxiety of potentially being put in her place.  Leguin’s fiction rejects the ethics of liberal empathy.  Instead, the ethical imperative is to know your own good life is already in her broom closet…”  Povinelli, 5

1.  So where do you think you would be, in the story?  In the city, or in the closet? Walking away?  Being that tricky narrator?  In the metawriting, or the writing itself?  Hiding in the binding of the book?

Is there anything left to say?

You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.