It has become a tenet of common sense that all understanding is predicated upon perspective. It is impossible to view anything except from a particular vantage point, and no vantage point can be taken up at any one time except by the exclusion of other vantage points.
This is true, but it often excuses a relativism that claims that there are only 'different points of view' or perhaps 'two sides to every story'. There are, in fact, often two sides to every story: the right side and the wrong side. No doubt, at every slave revolt the slave owners also had their own story to tell – there are indeed at least two sides to every slave revolt: the side of the oppressors and the side of the oppressed.
We might say the same of every strike that wins improved conditions for workers; that there is the side of the exploiters and the side of the exploited. Shall we then claim that every side is equal.
Under capitalism, we are all born into one side or another but that does not excuse us from the necessity of actually choosing one eventually – although in the case of the working class, ideologically choosing the side of the exploiters can be a rather unrewarding act if you must continue to sell your labour power in order to live. But precisely because some element of choice does still exist, there have been class traitors on either side. We all choose sides, only we do so either willy-nilly or consciously.
Precisely because understanding itself necessitates a perspective, our opinions and ideas can only be subjected to scrutiny if we also examine the perspective from which they were formed – that is if we are conscious of where we stand.
The limitations of being unable to do this should be obvious. On the one hand, an un-analitical approach to one's ideological positions would tend to put one on the side of the rulers, even if you happen to live on the side of the ruled. Failing to understand one's own general perspective also puts one at a serious disadvantage when trying to understand its limitations. It is true that certain perspectives would tend to make one see certain things that from another perspective would simply not be there – the slave owner may see obvious markers of racial inferiority where the slave sees nothing of the sort, conversely, the slave sees a people who ought to be free where the slave holders see something slightly above pack mules.
But the advantages and pitfalls adopting different perspectives are too facilely demonstrated by earth shaking cases like slave revolts or liberation. To demonstrate my point, I'd like to discuss a rather less important issue: literary analysis. In this case, the analysis of a particular award winning sci-fi story.
Ursula K. Le Guin's short fiction, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” presents the readers with a world that is – on the surface – very nearly perfect. It does not even seem to matter much, for the purposes which Le Guin seems to have in mind, that her readers would not have agreed on what counted as perfection – as long as we accept that Omelas is pretty wonderful.
The only suffering we are shown is in a room
about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. […] The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes [...] the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. […] The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.
(3)
The child is there, we are told, as the condition of Omelas' perfection:
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.
(3)
Most of the inhabitants of Omelas accept this but
[a]t times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. […] 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 towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
(4)
There is a fairly common reading of this story < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a_awt7rk-8 > where Omelas represents the First World or Western Capitalism while the child represents the Third World or minorities. This reading would seem to require us to assume an unforgivable moralism and elitism on the part of Le Guin where the only ones capable of even registering an objection to suffering are the same people who benefit from it in the first place – this may be true in Omelas, but it would be disgustingly patronising to attribute such helplessness to the poor and oppressed of the real world.
It is the typical tragic middle class do-gooder consciousness1 which imagines resistance as abstinent self-abnegation. The-ones-who-walk-away-from-Omels are, in a way that even the child cannot rival, the ultimate subaltern: the child at least gets to be displayed to the population of Omelas, even to speak; the-ones-who-walk-away do so in silence and disappear. It is a posture so anguished it must be delightfully heroic just contemplating it.
The perspective behind this reading is not just the typical Third World-ism that has become quite common in literary criticism in the undergraduate level. Most lecturers are at least aware of this, and quite a few students are as well. The underlying assumption – the linchpin – of the Omelas-as-the-First-World reading goes well beyond post-colonial politics and its explicit (sometimes admirable) fascination with the subaltern: the reading assumes that Western Capitalism is a utopia. This reading is the result of the watering down of the critical content of Post Modernism – a movement which was always inevitable in an intellectual position born from despair of the possibility of revolutionary change and which has since then systematically worked to discredit determined and organised resistance to capitalism while wasting nearly a whole generation's theoretical energies on pretentious attacks on discourse. Post-modernism/ structuralism/colonialism are not in and of themselves responsible, but, in spite of their obsession with The Other, the subaltern, the periphery, and all the rest, they have ended up collaborating with the very forces they claimed to critique to narrow the mainstream political imagination. It is the narcissistic petty-bourgeois perspective that only sees extremes of suffering at the periphery while missing the all-pervasive reality of exploitation and oppression under capitalism. (A reality which Le Guin herself can dimly grasp when she talks about the “banality of evil” (1))
It is entirely unkind to attribute such collusion to Le Guin. This narrow perspective is so ridiculously blinkered that it distracts readers from the elementary task of attending to the words on the page.
The people of Omelas are specifically contrasted with those of us who live under capitalism:
we do not say the words of cheer much any more. […] I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. […] we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. 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. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you.
(1)
The narrator here seems to combine revolutionary optimism with a truly insidious pessimism. A world without war and wretchedness, she can accept, she has seen it; but she takes her readers as so entirely twisted that she assumes we would find it more unbelievable and unintelligible than such incomprehensibilities as the stock exchange and the bomb. Of course, she is not entirely mistaken.
There is an important difference however between the narrator's perspective and Ursula Le Guin's: the narrator can accept the delight of Omelas, but for the purposes of the text, Le Guin does not. She uses the narrator in order to sell the dilemma which is at the heart of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”.
The narrator has seen Omelas, she has been to the Festival of Summer, heard the music, even learned something of it's geography – and she can describe them to us in their concrete almost ethnographic particularity. Nevertheless she does not describe Omelas to us primarily in the concrete mode; palpably frustrated at what she assumes is our inevitable and cynical incredulity, she declares,
I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. 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.
(1-2)
Rather than attempt to convince us of Omelas' concrete details, the narrator leads the readers on a kind of guided thought experiment. The result is that two modes of exposition emerge and co-mingle in the text: the concrete mode and the imaginary. These two modes, and more especially how the boundary between both blurs, are among the most interesting aspects of the text.
So, for example, when the narrator tells us,
I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming into Omelas during the last few days before the Festival on very fast little trains … and that the train station is the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmer's Market,
(2)
the Festival is in the concrete and the train station is imagined but the market might be either. This technique allows the narrator to ask the reader to imagine in Omelas whatever he or she likes (pending Le Guin's approval) and by that imagining make it so. Hence the orgy which we have added only for spice's sake becomes part of the very character of the city:
the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.
(2)
The narrator tells us, “at first I thought there were no drugs.” She could very well have thought this in the concrete mode (during her visit), but because she judges that such a thing would be “puritanical,” for those so inclined,
the faintest sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond belief; and it is not habit forming.
(2)
Thus the narrator has lead us to imagine an anarchist utopia, with few rules, no capitalism (or at least finance capitalism), erotic liberalism, communal childcare, unstructured spirituality, and legal marijuana. But because she has put the process of imagining Omelas as a city half in the mind so clearly in the forefront she begs the reader to dismiss it as hypothetical.
So she asks us to imagine the scapegoat living anywhere, “in a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings … or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes … It could be a boy or a girl.” (3) These things are accidental and she leaves them up to us, but unlike the orgy which may or may not happen, the child is clearly presented as concretely essential to Omelas – all this in spite of the slight of hand which a casual reading (such as my initial one) might tend to miss: there is no evidence that the narrator has actually seen the child, nor is it clear that she has heard “all the explanations ” (4) by which they justify its existence.
Its lonely suffering is the condition – like a divine covenant – part of the “terms” (4) set for the very possibility of Omelas. The reader accepts this because of the blurring of the concrete with the imagined, because even though the child is as concrete as the Festival of Summer which the narrator has really seen, it comes to us as imagined, even possibly a concession to the reader's dry and worldly scepticism. If Le Guin had only described Omelas in concrete terms the reader would have said that the reliance of any utopia upon the suffering of one child is harder to believe than the utopia itself, but as it stands readers tend only to see the moral dilemma it represents.
Hence Rochelle writes,
For the Omelans, there is knowledge of the child and the Faustian bargain it represents, and then, there is the choice: to stay, to accept or to leave. To make the choice becomes rhetorical: choose a paradise that is literally rotten at the base, or choose true freedom, with responsibility and compassion. The dialectic is thus set in motion: here, then, are things as they are, and here are things as they might be. Choose.
(99-100)
And Elliot,
this perfect society, depends upon and needs the suffering and misery of a single, innocent individual, representative of its most vulnerable, its most pure … [the] story recreates William James's theory of the scapegoat … intentionally opposing the possible permanent happiness of the many against the loss of just one, inconsequential child. In this short story, society and the individual are at odds, for Omelas survives as a whole through the unwilling sacrifice of a single part. But Omelas also loses the ethical few who cannot endure the price for their society's perfect happiness.2
(149)
Le Guin herself offers some belated explanation of the logic of the 'Faustian pact':
To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
[…]
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. … It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible
(4, my emphasis)
the richness of life in Omelas. As though the child had a purely ideological function! Having told us this she asks us confrontingly, “Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?” (4) as though our inability to accept Omelas as it was presented in the first part of the story were to blame for the suffering of the child. If that was one of Le Guin's more significant insights in the story, she did little to emphasise it.
Le Guin's subtle manipulation of our perspective – through the collaboration of the narrator and the style of her exposition – tricks the reader into accepting a dilemma that can have no basis in society other than a completely mythic one. But by so doing she also reveals the limits of her own perspective.
Le Guin is an anarchist – not a very well theorised one, but an anarchist with anti-capitalist politics who is interested in liberation. From that point of view, how useful is the dilemma she poses and the terms in which she sets it? Eliot is probably exaggerating when she makes the text into a story about society versus the individual, but the text certainly is highly individualistic. Social injustice is reduced to a victimisation rather than as the systematic result of class differences (or even a shared oppressed identity), similarly, the objection against it is made on an individual basis by voluntary martyrdom. The task set before the reader is to give a moral measure to a situation that is entirely impossible, to test our ability to be outraged against our ability to make arithmetic/utilitarian computations in an absolutely hypothetical scenario.
It winds up reinforcing the incredulity at joy on the part of the reader which so frustrated the narrator in the beginning. It not only fails to pose the real problems of liberation in a serious manner it actually compromises with that attitude which dismisses universal liberation as impossible in the first place.
For all that, what it succeeds in doing, even if only in moralistic rather than practical terms, is suggest that there is no liberation unless there is universal liberation. That is certainly an achievement.
Ursula Le Guin is at an immediate advantage over her less radical readers. Just as a slave holder's consciousness must involve a certain amount of bad faith, so too does the consciousness of the ruling class. Lukacs puts this better than I can:
… the rule of the bourgeoisie can only be the rule of a minority. Its hegemony is exercised not merely by a minority but in the interest of that minority, so the need to deceive the other classes and to ensure that their class consciousness remains amorphous is inescapable for a bourgeois regime …
But the veil drawn over the nature of bourgeois society is indispensable to the bourgeoisie itself […] Either they must consciously ignore insights which become increasingly urgent or else they must suppress their own moral instincts in order to be able to support with a good conscience an economic system that serves only their own interests.
(66)
Ursula Le Guin stands head and shoulders above so many of the people who have written about her because she has at least attempted to question the logic of the existing world. She does this not from the perspective of the working class, but from that of a very left-leaning petty bourgeoisie. Hence what Marxists would call alienation (and its results) she registers merely as wretchedness, hence her individualism and hence her moral abstractions about suffering. If she had experienced and understood the systematic class based suffering of wage labour and the solidarity of worker's resistance she might have posed much sharper questions.
This is not simply a matter of living as a worker (although it can be an advantage), but understanding what the working class is objectively in its relation to the rest of society – and of taking their side. This is what distinguishes a Marxist from an anti-capitalist.
Would Le Guin write with the style and elan she does now if she had been a Marxist? I don't know, perhaps not. Would she have contributed more to the liberation of humanity? I think the answer is probably a 'yes'.
Works Cited:
Cummins, Elizabeth. Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. 1990
Elliot, Winter “Breaching Invisible Walls: Individual Anarchy in 'The Dispossessed'” The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed' eds. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman. Oxford, UK: Lexington Books, 2005.
Lukacs, Georg. “Class Consciousness” History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London, UK: Merlin Press, 1971.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” 1972 (http://www.markaelrod.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/omelas.pdf)
Rochelle, Warren G. Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. London: Liverpool University Press. 2001
1In case you were unaware, 'middle class do-gooder' is a very technical term.
2This reading is particularly contradictory. If “Omelas survives as a whole through the unwilling sacrifice of a single part.” how can the scapegoat be “representative of its most vulnerable, its most pure” – surely it is the only thing that is vulnerable and pure in Omelas. Furthermore it is rather a stretch to couch this as Society versus the Individual just because Omelas tortures an individual.
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