Considering that LeGuin’s most famous short story (“Those Who Walk Away From Omelas”) has a very similar social situation that’s equally unexplained and silly, I’d say she doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.
*Omelas *doesn’t have " all the trappings of contemporary realism" , though - not in tone or language or genre.
Huh. You folks reminded me of when my draft lottery number was being picked.
LeGuin spends a lot of time (for such a short story) explaining (as the narrator) that she cannot explain Omelas. That it’s just this wonderful happy place (except for…) that we’re going to have to use our own imaginations to fill in the blanks, because the narrator is not up to the task. She tells us that even when the children of Omelas are taught about the terror, they don’t understand it, either.
Impossible to excerpt spoilery bit:
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.
I think, knowing that LeGuin has memories of her father criticizing The Lottery, it’s pretty clear that Omelas was very likely written in direct answer to it. She tried, not only to change the outcome, but to present a more realistic and complete vision of how these people can justify their action. (Or inaction.) It’s very much the same story, with a very different point of view.
I saw it in class. 1970s, so it was a film, not a video. Might have been early high school, might have been middle school. Can’t remember the discussion because I can’t remember anything these days.
There were several short stories that we watched instead of read. “Bartleby the Scrivener” was another.
Good thoughts, WhyNot, and well said.
And Bartleby? Ugh. Don’t get me started on Bartleby. I would’ve fired that annoying nonentity so fast his head would’ve spun. “‘I would prefer not to’? Fine. Clean out your desk. You’re done here. Buh-bye.”
I think that, perhaps, part of LeGuin’s point was precisely that Omelas was unrealistic. Too often, we see injustice in our world and just tell ourselves that that’s just the way it is, the way it must be. But we should instead be rejecting that notion, and saying that no, that’s not the way it must be, and working to change it.
That’s an interesting reading of Omelas, given that the people in the story who reject that society do exactly squat to change it, and instead just leave it.
It’s her dad’s legs that may or may not be stood upon; that article doesn’t give LeGuin’s opinion at all.
For folks interested in a similar bit of weird fiction, I offer the deeply disturbing, beautiful Singing My Sister Down.