By Glòria Torner
Biography
Ursula Kroeber Le
Guin was born in 1929 and grew up in Berkeley, California. Her parents were the
celebrated anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, who
chronicled the life of the last member of the Yahi tribe, Ishi. The Kroeber
family had a large collection of books, and they received a big number of
visitors, as members of the Native-American community, or well-known academics
such as Robert Oppenheimer. Though she was brought up in a non-religious
household, she took her personal spiritual beliefs from Taoist and Buddhist
traditions.
Le Guin attended
Berkeley High School. From 1947 to 1951 she took a Bachelor of Arts degree in French
Renaissance and Italian literature at Radcliffe College, and later, undertook
graduate studies at Columbia University. From 1953 to 1954, she won a Fulbright
grant to continue her studies in France. While travelling to France, she met the
historian Charles A. Le Guin, and they married in Paris in 1953. She began
doctoral studies, but abandoned them after her marriage. From 1957, they settled
in Portland, Oregon, had three children, and she began writing full-time,
publishing for nearly sixty years. She died in 2018.
Her oeuvre
includes twenty novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of
poetry, thirteen children’s books, five collections of essays and four works of
translation.
There are two main
topics in her novels: science fiction, following the literature of Arthur C.
Clarke, Philip K. Dick, or Isaac Asimov, and fantasy works following the steps
of J. R. R. Tolkien.
Le Guin wrote a cycle
of books of science fiction about the Hainish universe, beginning with World
(1966). The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is considered one of the
most acclaimed books of science fiction. The Word for World is Forest
(1973) was the source of inspiration to James Cameron to create the film Avatar.
The Dispossessed (1974) is an anarchist utopian novel. The book Always
Coming Home (1985) redefined the scope and style of utopian fiction.
She published her masterpiece
of fantasy, A Wizard of Earthsea, in1968, and during thirty years, she went
on writing this popular fictional world, a cycle of five books called the Books
of Earthsea.
She translated Tao
Te Ching from Lao Tzu. And Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, the
Chilean poet. Her final publications included non-fiction books, as Dreams
Must Explain Themselves and Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing,
and her last collection of poems, So Far So Good, all of which were
released after her death.
She became one of
the most well-known writers in the USA for her speculative fiction, winning,
among many other honours, the National Book Award, six Nebula Awards and the Kafka
Prize. In 2016, she joined the short list of authors to be published in their
lifetimes by the Library of America. Three of Le Guin’s books have been
finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas
It’s a
philosophical science fiction short story, first published in the anthology
New Dimensions 3, in 1973, and later as an independent publication,
in 1993. It is one of the author’s best-known short stories.
The story, written
by a single narrator who is not a character in the story itself, can be divided
into two parts:
First part:
The happiness
The story begins
with a long description with many details of the first day of summer in the
utopian city of Omelas, a town by the sea. The arrival of the summer solstice
is celebrated with a glorious festival: processions, music, full of horse races,
old people, smiling children, mothers with babes… They are going to the north
side of the city, called “Green Fields”.
Suddenly, the
narrator breaks the telling and speaks directly to the reader using a second
person addressing him as a participant, creating thus a sense of intimacy. He
wonders how is possible to describe such joy and happiness in this community.
The story follows
with a second, longer description about the life of the citizens. Now, the
reader discovers that this isn’t a traditional tale, but an irreal allegory or
a thought experiment. And the writer, second shifting to a more philosophical
and direct address, changes the style using not only the third person, also the
first person, singular or plural. The citizens of Omelas don’t have monarchy, police,
soldiers, the bomb, priests, or slavery, and they don’t need a stock exchange or
advertisements in Omelas, but they are not barbarians, they are intelligent,
sophisticated, and cultured.
On the last day
before the festival, people from other towns are arriving by train or trams to
Omelas to join its inhabitants. The magic atmosphere of orgy, with beautiful
nude people, nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready
to copulate with any man or woman…, and a little of “drooz” (drug), is the
demonstration of the contentment of all the people.
The processions have
arrived to the Green Fields, and suddenly a child of nine or ten plays on a
flute, a trumpet sounds, the young riders form a line, the crown waits for the horse
racing, they announce that the Festival of Summer has begun. Everything appears
perfect but…
2n part.
The sadness, the horror, the suffering child
With the sentence “Then
let me describe one more thing”, the narrator introduces the horrific
truth: the antagonist. He is an unnamed ten-years-old child, who is imprisoned
in a small, putrefied broom closet or disused tool room. He is covered in
festering sores. He suffers horribly because he is hungry, dirty, and always
alone.
All the
inhabitants of Omelas know that the child is there. Some would like to help the
child, but they know that, in that case, the prosperity of the town would be
destroyed. Nobody wants to rescue this child.
If everything has
appeared perfect, the happiness of the population depends on the eternal
suffering of this single child. The inhabitants of Omelas prefer happiness to
guilt, accepting the child’s misery as a necessary sacrifice for their joy.
But, at the end, some
inhabitants of Omelas decide to walk away. They leave the city to feel free
from culpability, because they can’t accept happiness based on a child’s
suffering. The narrator says that the place where they go is possible that doesn’t
exist, but this people know where they are going.
The narrator
reflects that “Omelas sound in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long
ago and far away, once upon a time”.
And Ursula Le Guin
has written a great dystopia!
QUESTIONS
-Do you think that free copulation with anyone can be a part of general happiness?
-Is a society with fewer rules happier?
-What does these sentences suggest to you: "Happiness is something rather stupid" and "Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting"?
-Is technology an obstacle to happiness?
-What do you imagine it will happen when the poor boy in the tool room dies?
VOCABULARY
rigging, shimmering, dodged, halter, bit, manes, pranced, dulcet, pedants, goody-goody, godhead, manned, sticky, seeps, second-hand, wither, snivelling