Category: Reviews (Page 6 of 6)

We have been drawn to stories from the time our ancestors huddled around the fire and listened and learned and were entertained and enthralled by the tales of others.


Those stories with mythic qualities have even more power, for they tap into our collective unconscious, those memories that seem hard-coded into us. The Hero’s Journey, what Joseph Campbell called the “monomyth,” borrowing from James Joyce, has always seemed right to me in its depiction of an underlying collective memory that storytellers tap into (Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers admirably decodes literary myth-making with its incisive analysis of both classic literature and more popular fiction). The power of storytelling and myth is real, whether or not Jung’s theory about archetypes is correct. We respond instinctively to certain symbolic tales, and find literary themes that address elemental human concerns to be compelling.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” is—she has written—based on the “psychomyth” of the scapegoat; she says she was inspired by William James’ statement that “one could not accept a happiness shared with millions if the condition of that happiness were the suffering of one lonely soul.” The story, which won the Hugo Award, has been included in a number of literary short story anthologies—even though the prolific Le Guin is best known for her science fiction and fantasy—and it surfaces on the reading list in some English and Philosophy classes.

The story is very simple. Le Guin introduces us to an exotic, mystical city, Omelas, “bright-towered by the sea,” whose fortunate residents (“the people of Omelas are happy people”) enjoy a Utopian existence, with plentiful creature comforts (drugs, sex, and music–if not rock-and-roll), magnificent public buildings, ideal weather, and without “monarchy and slavery… the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb.” And, as the narrator hastens to tell us, without guilt. (Is Omelas the model society Swedish socialists thought they were building?)

But this fairy tale has a flaw. This society is founded on the misery and degradation of one child, imprisoned in a dirty, dark cellar room furnished with a bucket and two mops, kept from human contact and sunlight. (A number of critics have seen Christ-like symbolism in the description of the child). What is worse, everyone in this “joyous city” knows about the child; they are complicit in its inhumane treatment.

…Some of them understand why, and some do not, but 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.

It is carefully explained to every citizen of the city that freeing the child will destroy all “the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas.” So, while they may come to view the child, no one intervenes.

And it is easy to rationalize the situation with a coldly logical Utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. The narrator tells us that “the terrible justice of reality” is that this child has been so damaged by its environment that freedom would be relatively meaningless. Indeed, perhaps (drawing from Eastern religious thought) the wretchedness of the child makes possible the beauty of Omelas by stirring the compassion of the city’s denizens.

Except, we are told, there are some who cannot accept the rationalizations and the treatment of the child. These are “the ones who walk away,” who are so disgusted and troubled by the “wretched child” in the basement that they leave. Where they are bound when they leave Omelas is not revealed, but “they seem to know where they are going.”

There is some ambiguity about their departure. Unlike Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People,” where we can identify with the heroic Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who risks all to expose the contaminated water supply in his town, the “ones who walk away” are—by comparison—passive, not active, in their resistance. By choosing exile they have tacitly accepted the continued depravity of the child’s imprisonment. They have walked away.

What should we think of those who do leave? Are they to be admired or pitied? Have they just enough moral clarity to separate themselves from the ongoing evil at the heart of Omelas, but not enough courage to resist?

The acceptance of the necessary evil, always in the name of the greater good, has a long (if not admirable) history. It was the argument used by otherwise thoughtful American Southerners to justify slavery. In the days before the collapse of Communism, I remember those on the Left who would quote Mao that you could not make an omelette without breaking a few eggs–a rationalization of the horrid things done to the Chinese people in order to create a “soclalist paradise.” There is always a justification available.

In portraying the “happy people of Omelas” Le Guin borrows a bit from an earlier science fiction master, H.G. Wells. The Eloi, his hedonistic “beautiful people” of 802,701 AD in “The Time Machine,” are also apathetic; they passively allow the evil race of subterranean Morlocks to periodically consume some of their own people in exchange for their comfort. In the 1960 film version of the novel, Wells’ hero, The Time Traveller (played by Rod Taylor) incites the Eloi to successfully resist the Morlocks (blue monsterish creatures designed to scare millions of American children).

Le Guin will have none of the Hollywood heroics. Her story—this myth of Omelas—has no figure who prizes justice above the status quo in Utopia. There is no one saying “Fiat justitia, ruat coelum“—“Let justice be done, though Heavens fall.”

I think she sells us short with this—by us, I mean humans. Doesn’t history teach that there will always be someone who resists injustice (real or perceived)? We are too cranky a lot, in some ways, too volatile, too violent. Too skeptical of authority. We are not the Eloi, nor the “happy people of Omelas.” We don’t always settle for scapegoats.

Where in Omelas is Spartacus? Andrei Sakharov? Joan of Arc? Cesar Chavez? Harriet Tubman? Rosa Park? William Wallace? Oskar Schindler? Aung San Suu Kyi? Nelson Mandela? Lech Walesa? Whether you accept force as an appropriate way to confront injustice and oppression, or believe only in non-violent means of resistance, where are those who say no, the individuals who resolutely confront that which is wrong? Don’t we have something hard coded in us that occasionally drives us to fight for human dignity? True, courage is often in short supply, and compromise—looking the other way—is a classic survival technique. But I think of the times when someone has refused to get in line when the personal and societal consequences were severe: The Ones Who Stay and Fight.

So while “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” cannot be faulted for its technique or structure, nor for its prose, there is something hollow, something writerly and contrived, about Le Guin’s tale. Or perhaps more precisely, there is something inhuman about it: the people of Omelas do not share the DNA of homo sapiens, or at least not the ones trapped in this stage of our evolutionary history.

Jefferson Flanders is author of the Cold War thriller Herald Square.

The Amazon.com link for the reviewed story: Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Wind’s Twelve Quarters”

Copyright © 2006 Jefferson Flanders

All rights reserved

Doris Lessing’s short story “A Woman on a Roof” transports us to a less complex time, to the early 1960s, when the roles of men and women were clearer, before the Sexual Revolution and feminism, to a time when “bourgeois” morality and patriarchy ruled.

Yet this deceptively simple story doesn’t seem dated, even nearly some 45 years later, in an age of “Sex and the City” reruns and “Girls Gone Wild” videos, because in it Lessing surfaces some elemental questions about male aggression and female sexuality, and about class and power.

“A Woman on a Roof” relies on a minimalist plot. “It was during the week of hot sun, that June,” Lessing begins, and tells a story of three London workmen—Harry, Stanley and Tom—who are replacing gutters on a roof, one with “a fine view across several acres of roof.” When they spot an attractive woman sun-bathing who “wore a red scarf tied around her breasts and brief red bikini pants,” they are annoyed and yet excited. Stanley, recently married, and Tom, seventeen, keep walking over to stare at her, to the dismay of Harry, who is older and responsible for the crew completing the gutter job.

The next morning when they return she is “already there, face down, arms spread out, naked except for the little red pants” and when Stanley whistles, she picks up her head, looks straight at him, and drops her head. This is enough to spark their hostility:

At this gesture of indifference, they all three, Stanley, Tom and old Harry, let out whistles and yells. Harry was doing it in parody of the younger men, making fun of them, but he was also angry. They were all angry because of her utter indifference to the three men watching her.

“Bitch,” said Stanley.

“She should ask us over,” said Tom, snickering.

Lessing has set her scene carefully: the men are both attracted and repelled by the woman (that peculiar English mixture of randiness and Puritanism) and, in turn, they are angered by the woman’s indifference. But how can we blame her? She wants to sun bathe in peace, to be left alone, and she has done nothing provocative…except for who she is and what she looks like. The men are stung at being dismissed by a desirable young woman—her indifference hits at their male pride, leaving them feeling powerless. As this is England, there is also the class question: is she ignoring them because they are working men? Does her indifference suggest that they are so far below her on the social ladder that they no longer count as male in her eyes?

(What is it about the 1960s and swimsuits and class envy? Lessing’s unnamed female protagonist wears the equivalent of a bikini; John Updike’s upper-class summer girls invade the local grocery store wearing scanty swimsuits in his classic “A&P.” It seems the bikini represents a challenge to working-class propriety, and the unattainable long-legged females who wear them can do so because their money and privilege allows them to ignore the rules.)

The roofers in “A Woman on a Roof” won’t leave the situation alone: they have been diminished and they resent it. Later, Stanley and Tom scramble across several rooftops so they can move closer to the woman. They find her reading a book and smoking and, once again, feel compelled to bother her.

They whistled. She looked up at them, cool and remote, then went on reading. Again, they were furious. Or rather, Stanley was. His sun-heated face was screwed into a rage as he whistled again and again, trying to make her look up. Young Tom stopped whistling. He stood beside Stanley, excited, grinning, but he felt as if he were saying to the woman: Don’t associate me with him, for his grin was apologetic.

The harassment continues over the next few days (even when she has moved her sunning spot to avoid them) until Harry “to save some sort of scandal or real trouble over the woman” pulls the crew off the roof. Tom, who has been fantasizing about the woman, convinced that he has acted to protect her from Stanley, sneaks over to see her, and is rebuffed. She tells him to go away and “in a low reasonable voice, where anger was kept in check, though with difficulty” she adds “if you get a kick out of seeing women in bikinis, why don’t you take a ride a sixpenny ride to the Lido? You’d see dozens of them, without all this mountaineering.”

It is a few minutes before Tom accepts that his fantasy-lover is just that—a fantasy. Lessing tells us:

Resentment of her at last moved him off and away down the ladder, through the building, into the street. He got drunk then, in hatred of her.

Next day when he woke the sky was gray. He looked at the wet gray and thought, vicious: Well, that’s fixed you, hasn’t it now? That’s fixed you good and proper.

The story concludes with the workmen returning to finish their work on “damp drizzling roofs where no one came to sun themselves.” There is something raw and disturbing about the whole thing. This innocent woman, trying only to enjoy the summer weather, has become the target of abuse and hostility. The men see her as a “bitch,” and Tom, who has dreamed about her, now hates her.

At least Lessing allows her nameless character to have a voice, to say “go away,” to express some of her anger at being hassled, but this is England in 1963 (the same year Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is published) and that is probably as much as we can expect.

The story, seen from a feminist perspective, illuminates how easily men can be threatened by female independence (especially in sexual matters) and how they can respond violently when their sense of control and mastery is challenged. We are not far from the territory of degradation and rape, here, where the motivation is power, not sex.

What makes the story hold up well, even today, is that while much has changed, much has not. Even with the greater sexual openness of the past 45 years, and the advent of “sexual liberation,” even with more gender equality and autonomy for women, male sexual aggression—often expressed in ugly terms—has not disappeared from the scene.

Some of the work done in evolutionary psychology over the past few decades has helped explain the tension between male and female conceptions of sexuality, and why the hard-coded behavior of men has proven hard to change. (Sexual harassment remains a continuing problem, even in the most seemingly “progressive” institutions—universities, hospitals, the United Nations—despite years of consciousness-raising and training.)

Yet things are different. “You’ve come a long way, baby” is more than an advertising slogan; there has been a social revolution in the status of women since 1963. In most Western societies a woman is expected to control her own sexual destiny; barriers to employment and schooling have been dropped; domestic violence is now prosecuted; sexual harassment is frowned upon; male supremacy is considered an outmoded concept.

Certainly a woman sunning herself on a London roof today could encounter male hostility, but I’d like to think that the underlying dynamics have changed somewhat from Lessing’s time. The woman could, and would, respond more assertively, perhaps matching any verbal aggression with some choice words of her own. The men might very well back off, letting her enjoy the sunny weather in peace. Small beer, the English might say, as far as progress goes, but progress nonetheless.

Jefferson Flanders is author of the Cold War thriller Herald Square.

The Amazon.com link for the reviewed story: Doris Lessing: “Stories”

Copyright © 2006 Jefferson Flanders

All rights reserved