Okay guys, I have been chewing this quotation form Orson Scott Card over for a few weeks now. I cannot get it out of my head, and I thought I should share it with you. Orson Scott Card is the author of the Ender’s Game series. He’s a devout Mormon and this series is complete science fiction with no mention of Mormonism. In this interview he was asked if his moral lessons were intentional in his books. This is his answer:
There’s always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won’t reflect the storyteller’s true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he’s been persuaded of.
But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don’t even think to question, that you don’t even notice– those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations. There are plenty of Mormons who think my stuff is terrible or evil because I don’t preach the Mormon gospel in every book. My answer is, “Yes, I do, but only to the extent that I believe it so deeply that I don’t even realize I’m teaching it as it comes out.”
And, of course, there’s a lot of other beliefs from other sources. I’m also an American, I’m an individual with a certain set of experiences, and I’m a member of my family, and all of those communities have given shape to my life. So moral teachings that arise from all of those settings will emerge in my fiction. At the same time, I’ll also reveal the areas where I disagree with many mainstream beliefs in each of those traditions.
Here’s what I want to highlight. “It will only reflect what he believes he believes.” YES. As a huge offender of trying to stuff a moral lesson down audiences’ faces, I know this is not successful. Also, Card makes a great point that looking at your own art is a great way to realize what you really believe. Isn’t that a cool way to approach the combination of morality and art?
2 Comments
Ilana Brownstein posted on November 16, 2011 at 2:17 am
I feel compelled to point out some salient facts about Orson Scott Card — namely, that the “moral lessons” he embeds in his work lately are of the homophobic, hateful variety.
I direct you to this write up in Queerty (http://goo.gl/cmuPl), which details how Card takes pains to link homosexuality with pedophilia, and other aberrant behavior. And this in a version of Hamlet, no less.
He says, “But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by.” Go read his terrible and hateful “Hamlet’s Father” — I’m not sure if it’s better or worse if what he ended up with (“morals”-wise) weren’t purposeful. Here’s a plot summary. Spoilers!
“Hamlet’s father was gay, and that this made him a terrible king. And his ghost was actually a demonic liar that misled Hamlet as to his cause of death. Claudius didn’t kill Hamlet’s dad after all — instead, it was Horatio, who was taking revenge on Hamlet’s dad for molesting him as a little boy. Hamlet’s dad also molested Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, and turned all four of them gay in the process.”
Sigh.
Ilana Brownstein posted on November 16, 2011 at 2:29 am
PS: This review is totally worth the read:
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2011summer/card.shtml
Favorite excerpts:
“The extent of the novella’s failure is surprising—and embarrassing, given that Card is a skilled veteran novelist and Subterranean a well-respected press. The most polite thing for us to do would be to walk away and quietly forget the whole painful exercise. But Card does not deserve our polite amnesia. His failures should be known and remembered, because the revelation in his “revelatory new version” turns out to be a nightmare of vitriolic homophobia.”
And this is a quote from Card himself:
“There is a myth that homosexuals are ‘born that way,’ and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it . . . The dark secret of homosexual society—the one that dares not speak its name—is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.”