"Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe

Jerry Friedman · 01 May 2011, 14:53 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Sun, 1 May 2011 07:53:47 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) "Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe
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> From: Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie>

> From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at io.com> 
> > On 4/30/2011  9:29 PM, Matthew Knapton wrote:
> >> Well, it's a comment that even when  the 'gain' is as huge as it is in
> >> Omelas, there's something wrong  about the purposeful mistreatment and
> >> deprivation of an innocent.  Whether you like the story or not, that's
> >> undeniably a moral  statement, yes.
> > 
> > But is "there's something wrong about the  purposeful mistreatment and
> > deprivation of an innocent" a useful or  meaningful moral statement? Is the 
>wrongness greater or lesser if > > the  mistreatment is without purpose, or if 
>the purpose is unknown? Compare Jackson's  "The Lottery," and > > the news items 
>about the third-world villages poisoned by 1st  world computer waste.
> 
> I think the story vividly and memorably points up a  rather difficult ethical 
>issue, which most makers and/or
> purveyors of  moral/ethical systems would like to be able to ignore, given that 
>to some extent  it is probably
> insoluble in a practical sense.

And an emotional issue, an issue about our moral feelings.  The James quotation 
is

"Or 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 torture, what except a 
specifical 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?"

http://books.google.com/books?id=iSikDHxjIyEC&pg=PA68

In /The Wind's Twelve Quarters/, Le Guin points out James's "naively 
gentlemanly" assumption that all his readers are "as decent as himself".

> So for me that makes it a  story worth writing/reading, even if the author 
>herself cops out at the end  (they
> seem to know where they are going, those who walk away from Omelas, but  the 
>reader is left pretty much
> in the dark).

Well, the narrative voice clearly admits that she too is in the dark.  But /The 
Dispossessed/, /The Eye of the Heron/, and /Always Coming Home/ certainly look 
like attempts to show how societies could exploit nobody, how reduction of the 
number of deliberately tortured lost souls could be reduced to zero.  I don't 
know what Le Guin would say about what she really believes.

I haven't read /The Devil in a Forest/, but those who have might enjoy comparing 
it and contrasting it to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".

Jerry Friedman

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