Walking Away from Guantanamo

Between the Covers
Ursula K. Le Guin's Parable for Our Grotesque Times

By Alan Williams
Mar 15, 2007

Dragging characters out of books and into unrelated events can prove less illuminating than tiresome — and more for the characters' reputations than readers. While a wealth of conflicted themes are lent by invoking Anna Karenina as she pertains to adulterous situations, I’m content for that patron saint of cheaters to be left beneath the train tracks, dead. Ditto Madame Bovary. Ditto Hester Prynne. A trend is developing here, perhaps more for personal reasons than their frequency of allusion; nonetheless such comparisons are as old and dusty as Mrs. Havisham.

Certain potent figures hold our consciousness in such magnetic thrall that we cannot help but offer analogous real-world examples. George Bush as a modern-day Captain Ahab, hell bent on chasing and destroying the invisible, monstrous Osama bin Laden to the peril of innocent followers, was the metaphor du jour till he got distracted by a detestable but measly squid named Saddam. It’s difficult to name another personality half as pervasive and startlingly recognizable even to those who have not read Moby Dick (except for perhaps Jesus, to whom Bush has also been compared, but that’s for another column).

The same literary pickings on which we have to draw parallels are proportional to literacy in general. Yet journalists and writers bear the burden of making fiction relevant to today’s political sphere, no matter the reader’s bookshelf. Here and there, they are reaching in inspired ways to articulate this grotesque national moment by calling upon relationships in novels that are ultimately far more enduring than we are.

Camille Paglia recently described the Bush/Cheney codependency as “an unsavory, toxic relationship, a vampiric pseudo-marriage like that of the shadowy, Machiavellian Roger Chillingworth and the impressionable, waffling Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.” Spinning momentary sympathy for the first lady, James McManus compared Laura Bush to Gretta Conroy from James Joyce’s “The Dead” in a downright frightening profile. McManus wonders if Laura, who at age 16 ran a stop sign and accidentally killed rumored boyfriend Michael Douglas, sometimes looks at her horse’s ass of a husband and pines for her deceased love, just as Gretta Conroy can’t let go of the lovelorn and dead Michael Furey even though she is married to a self-involved paragon of civic virtue. Going out on a limb like that takes imagination, balls, and a gut instinct so weirdly compelling he just may be right.

These and other examples demonstrate, within the lurid three-ring circus of Washington, what Milan Kundera describes in his new book The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. That is, reality is “pre-interpreted” — “a magic curtain, woven of legends…already made-up, masked, reinterpreted” — and it is only the novel that can rip away this skein to reveal the lies and hypocrisy bred by greed and the corrupting pursuit of power. This is the same morally hardcore view of literature that Europeans have traditionally taken, but after seven years of lies and bombastic manipulation the time has come for the U.S. to up its dosage.

Who are the characters, though, that could encompass the Iraq war and its victims? How long will it take for this moment, from 9/11 onward, to gestate in some creative consciousness for a character to emerge capable of reflecting it?

These were the questions simmering when I read a postcard last week on PostSecret, since removed, from a child being held at Guantanamo Bay. My mind raced between its paradoxical rainbow-colored lines to the child in the cellar at the end of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the 1975 short story by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Told in an ironic, singsong voice fit for reading a fairy tale, Omelas is described in the Festival of Summer as the happiest place imaginable with child-like denizens, subject to no law, whose "victory they celebrate is that of life." So preposterous is their pure happiness — "based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary or destructive, and what is destructive" — that Le Guin engages the reader directly: "I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as good-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy."

Such bliss, as it turns out, is dependent upon the torture of a child, addressed mainly as "it," kept in a cellar: "Some of them understand why, and some do not, but 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." Suddenly, with this very American revelation, Omelas becomes quite believable.

Who is this child beyond the “it” of the story? It would be too simple to say that he is essentially the child who wrote the postcard. That he is all of the tortured, despite “diplomatic assurances” that prisoners will not be persecuted even as they undergo extraordinary rendition, despite John McCain’s Military Commissions Act that still allows the president to determine in secret what the CIA will define as torture in its prisons. That he is the abandonment of the ancient right to habeas corpus, to challenge one’s imprisonment in court. That he is future generations. That he is what’s slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

It would be too easy to draw these connections — although they are true — because “Omelas, bright-towered by the sea” is more like the country in Bush’s head than the U.S. at large. Plenty of citizens know about and are outraged by the well-documented practices at Guantanamo and around the world to no effect. As Le Guin puts it, "Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free."

The uneasy release from this condition, which Le Guin based on a scenario created by William James in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," are those who visit the child and then do not return home, who "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."

So where, folks, do we go from here? For one, take a hard look at the scapegoat in the cellar, in our national soul. Two, ban torture for real. Three, walk away.