Every week, the Book Ends Podcast will be presenting a review of a short story. They span all genres and often require the ability to read.
It’s a well known troupe within literary fiction, that when you seen a pleasant, cheery, easy-going town where the people all look alike and get along, that there’s probably nothing going on beneath the surface.
This place, Omelas, is filled with people who are happy and contented. Not, as the author carefully explains, naïve people, happy like children, but reasonable, mature, thoughtful and happy adults who are content in their lives and go without the stock market or religious clergy or the fitbit. The author uses the word “orgy” in this story to refer to the sexual pleasures of the Omelas citizenry, which is the first term the StoryTime. data analytics team uses in their search for potential stories to review. So one would assume that this story has a dark undercurrent of sexual deviancy and violence, like a Tea Party Conference in Dothen, Alabama. But that’s simply not the case. Are we so cynical to assume that there cannot be a place of pure happiness in the world? I blame you reader, for your Breaking Bad binge-watching and your love of “dark” superheros.
Ok, so there’s one little bit of unhappiness at the heart of Omelas. When it’s revelead, you’re disgusted and ashamed, and it puts everything you’ve read about Omelas in a new light. But, as my interns with their MFAs have explained to me, it’s supposed to be a metaphor. After I stared at my interns for a long, pregnant moment, they then explained to me what a metaphor was. It’s possible to read this story purely as a fantastical tale about a fictional city. Or it could be read as a critique of the human need to have the joy of some be at the horrific expense of others. This makes sense to me. I’m not happy unless previously mentioned interns, at the end of their 80-hour (unpaid) week, look up and me from their close-quartered co working desks, and each shed a single, solitary tear.
Ursula K. LeGuin has made a career out of what I’ve just learned is a metaphor. Apparently you can use metaphors for all kinds of things. A genre can be a metaphor, so the genre of science fiction, when it’s talking about rocketships and flash Gordon and Donald Rumsfeld, can also be talking about something else. I’m still getting to grips with what a metaphor actually means, and I’m not entirely sure that my interns aren’t playing a prank on me after I took away their health insurance, but I think that LeGuin is making a harsh criticism of our society as a whole, and how we view humanity in relation to others. But that’s impossible. Surely something wonderful in our lives that gives us easy pleasure, let’s say, an iPhone, couldn’t come from the pain of others. Could it? I’m not so sure anymore. This conversation is upsetting me, and my interns are already recoiling into their button-down shirt and sweat vest combination
For the complete story, read it for free here.
