In her speech on receiving the National Book Foundation Medal in 2014, Ursula
Le Guin, who died this past week at the age of 88, scolded publishers for
giving over their responsibility to support good writing and great literature
to the sales department, which often promotes authors as if they were deodorant.
Books ae not just commodities, Le Guin argued, and said that now that she was nearing
the end of her career she did not want to watch American literature get trivialized,
for, she proudly insisted, the name of the beautiful reward writers seek is not
profit, but freedom.
. La Guin called her most famous short story, “The
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a variation on a theme by William James. In
her introduction to her book The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975), she
cites the following passage from James's essay "The Moral Philosopher and
the Moral Life" as the ideological source of the story:
[If] the hypothesis were offered us of a
world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all
be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition
that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torment, what except a specific and independent sort of emotion can it
be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us
to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its
enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain."
Indeed, the
story is geometrically neat in its exploration of the nature of human
happiness. The first half presents the familiar convention in science fiction
and fantasy of the futuristic utopia.
However, the
narrator, aware of the perfect utopian nature of Omelas and of the human
skepticism about such complete happiness, chides readers for the bad habit,
encouraged by sophisticates and pedants, of considering happiness as something
rather stupid and only evil interesting.
To belie these very words, the story inevitably reaches a point at which
the narrator says that if we do not believe the joy of the beautiful city, then
one more thing must be described. At
this point, the narrator shifts to a description of the hidden child, which is,
as Collins suggests, the classic image of the scapegoat. The magic of the scapegoat depends on the
willingness of the people to rationalize the existence of evil as something
that exists outside of themselves, for which they have no responsibility.
The people of
Omelas are not happy because they are ignorant of the child, but precisely
because they are aware of it. The ones
who leave Omelas may be the weaker ones because they cannot live with the
knowledge of evil, and thus they leave for some place where they think there is
no evil. As the narrator says, such a place
may not even exist.
Changing Planes, one of
her last books, before she decided that her fiction inspiration had dried up,
is a classic example of the “what if” school of literary creation. “What
if” you took the most tedious hiatus of modern life—the mind-numbing wait in an
airport between changing planes—and transformed it into a marvelous opportunity
to change planes of reality?
After a brief introduction describing the method of one Sita Dulip of
Cincinnati, who discovered that by an imaginative twist she could go anywhere
“because she was already between planes,” Le Guin “what ifs’ her way through
fifteen Gulliverian and Borgesian explorations of “interplanary travel.”
Although these playful pieces make no pretense to the biting satire of
Jonathan Swift or the profound epistemology of Jorge Borges, Le Guin seems to
have great fun here puncturing some of the pretenses of modern society and
examining some of the paradoxes of the human condition. Among the Swiftian
satires are stories about the Veksi, a species of angry people whose social
life consists of arguments, fights, sulks, brawls, feuds, and acts of
vengeance; the Ansarac, a migratory race whose elegant birdlike beauty is
intolerable to more “civilized” planes; and the Hegns, all of whom are members
of a Royal Family.
The Borgesian explorations include tales of the Asonu, a profound
people who have no language because transcendent knowledge cannot be expressed
in language; the Hennebet who, because they make no split between body and
spirit, have no need for religion, dogma, or formulated metaphysics; and the
Frin who all dream the same dreams and thus experience a true communal bonding.
This “what if” method of creation, although sometimes satirically
scintillating and occasionally philosophically profound, runs the risk of every
so often becoming merely sophomorically silly. For example, if there is an
actual Easter Island and an actual Christmas Island, “what if” there were a
Halloween Island, a July Fourth Island, a New Year’s Island, etc.? And what
about Wake Island? What would life and
reality itself be like if there were a people who never slept at all? Would they all be geniuses because they did
not waste time in idle slumber, or would they only be able to live in mundane
fact because the way to truth is through lies and dreams?
The great nineteenth-century poet and thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge
once made an important distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Creative products of Fancy, he suggested, are
clever composites of disparate things that may amuse and edify, but creations
of the imagination are genuinely new entities that exceed the mere sum of their
parts. Although Ursula K. Le Guin has succeeded in the past in creating
provocative works of true imagination, in Changing Planes she is mostly
just having some fanciful fun. These are
not masterful satires that will alter your view of society, nor are they
profound parables that will change your notion of what reality is. But they are amusing “what ifs” with which you
can pleasantly pass some stale time while you are waiting to change planes in
an airport, which Le Guin describes as a “nonplace in which time does not pass
and there is no hope of any meaningful existence.”
Ursula Le Guin, thank you for the profound sense of a meaningful existence
you gave us. We will miss you.
