Orson Scott Card and Morality

This is old news, but I just read John Kessel's essay, Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality.

It's a thoughtful and thorough criticism of the Sci-Fi novels Ender's Game, and Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card. It also touches on issues of victimization that seem to explain the novels' appeal to adolescents.

Kessel writes:

       Card has spoken in interviews about his tropism for the story of the person who sacrifices himself for the community.  This is the story, he tells us, that he has been drawn to tell again and again.  For example, in justification of the scenes of violence in his fiction, Card told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990 that, “In every single case, cruelty was a voluntary sacrifice. The person being subjected to the torture was suffering for the sake of the community.  I find this statement astonishingly revealing.  By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.”  Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. No, in these situations, according to Card the person being tortured is Ender, and even though he walks away from every battle, the sacrifice is his.  In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence.  It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game.

       If, therefore, intention alone determines guilt or innocence, and the dead are dead because of misunderstanding or because they bring destruction on themselves, and the true sacrifice is the suffering of the killer rather than the killed—then Ender’s feeling of guilt is gratuitous. Yet despite the fact that he is fundamentally innocent, he takes “the sins of the world” onto his shoulders and bears the opprobrium that properly belongs to the people who made him into their instrument of genocide.  He is the murderer as scapegoat. The genocide as savior. Hitler as Christ the redeemer.

Though less scholarly, Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat, by Roger Williams, provides some interesting context.

Williams writes:

I tended (and still tend) to agree with this, but if the Hitler Hypothesis offends you I'm afraid I'm about to do her one better. You see, I'm not very convinced that Card even wrote the books.

On the phone and in his incoherent published reply, Card repeatedly shows ignorance of what he himself purportedly wrote. I simply cannot imagine how you could write such a stunningly well crafted piece of work (inasmuch as it is wildly popular and deeply affects people) without being aware of every fibre and splinter of its composition. About the third or fourth time I heard Card say something wasn't in his book that I knew was, I began to suspect that it was more of a committee effort.

Interesting stuff. Fascism and righteous revenge are as seductive as ever. Never mind the bodies, I meant well. Really, this hurts me more than it hurts you.