APOCALYPSE: NEW KNOWLEDGE OR THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ESTABLISHED ORDER (ONTOLOGY OF EVERYDAY IN ANTI-UTOPIA)

Abstract

The article examines the everydayness of a work of art in a fantastic work through the prism of apocalyptic motifs. The purpose of the study is to rethink the apocalyptic component of everyday life in Ursula Kroeber le Guin’s work “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. The methods of literary analysis are hermeneutic, psychological, consideration of everyday life. The Apocalypse, starting with the biblical books, has a clear sequence of events, structure and images that have intertextual influences on the subsequent literature of the Christian world. The direct and indirect subordination of the influence of biblical motifs on the work of writers as a “great code” (N. Frye) affected various genres. One of these genres is anti-utopia of various kinds, including social fiction. The everydayness of social fiction is subject not only to the genre requirements of the reproduction of reality, but also to the ratio of the components of the Lebenswelt. Dasein, moral, spiritual, material world and cultural codes. Ursula le Guin’s work is a confirmation of that. The story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, according to the genre definition of the author, is a psychomyth, combines features of anti-utopia in social fiction, psychological parable. The moral imperatives considered by the writer relate not only to the possibility of creating an ideal state, where general happiness is possible at the expense of the grief of individual citizens, but are subject to the problems of a person’s choice of life path, feelings of guilt, empathy, generations and religions, and many other moral and ethical aspects of human interaction and society. Parallels to apocalyptic motifs appear already from considerations about the possibility of happiness without joy, without empathy, then they are correlated with the choice of an earthly path and belief/disbelief in the Last Judgment with a sense of guilt, and Omelas is contrasted with the hellish torment of a child, and the path from Omelas as a search for the salvation of the soul. So the change of existence for those who decided to leave the apparently ideal state is the destruction of the established order, but at the same time, as in the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment is an opportunity to start a new life, to change for the better. The fear of changes, the unknown, forces some residents to suppress their conscience, forget about other people’s grief and be happy, forgetting guilt, and forces others to take decisive actions, to change their established existence. The everydayness of Omelas destroys some, and pushes others to save their own souls.