Roles of Autobiography in Orson Scott Card's Storytelling Emma Meador
Orson Scott Card is a science fiction author. He creates new, strange worlds. His stories are full of aliens and spaceships, mystical forces and many things that could never exist in our 'real' world. Yet, despite this fantastical subject matter, it would surprise none of his regular readers to be told that much of his work is autobiographical. Card's writing is so laced with aspects of his life and beliefs that it's impossible to read his work without becoming acquainted with the author himself. But this infusion of autobiographical elements isn't random chance or an accident. Card has articulated very specific goals motivating the fiction that he writes, and autobiography is a crucial element in accomplishing them. According to Card, storytelling is how people define themselves as individuals and as part of their community. Everyone tells stories constantly, he says: they tell "the story they want to believe about themselves, the story they actually believe about themselves, the story they want others to believe about them, the stories they believe about others, and the stories that they are afraid might by true about themselves and others," to the point where the stories make up the individual's very identity (MM 273). In the same way, stories form the identity and the very existence of communities, as he said in an interview with Publishers Weekly: "Stories are the genes of the community. They are what passes from generation to generation, from person to person, that which gives the community its identity and allows it to continue" (DeCandido). Because of the central role that storytelling plays within communities, Card claims storytelling should be used to explore questions of the humanity and the morality. In fact, he claims, "It is impossible to tell a story that is not about moral choices. . . . you can't tell a story that has more than one thing happen in it without somebody having made . . . some decision to proceed, which will always involve in some way or other a moral choice. . . . I deal with non-traditional choices, situations where you don't have anything that's clear cut" (DeCandido). Given this highly moralized choice of themes, and in light of his strong Mormon background, it would seem that Card would turn to religious literature, but Card has a bone to pick with religious fiction: You have to understand that what passes for religious literature in the U.S. today is really inspirational literature. The Religious, New Age, and Occult publishing categories all contain very similar kinds of stories: Isn't it wonderful that we understand the truth and live the right way, and ain't it a shame about the poor saps who don't. [It] is self-congratulatory. It doesn't explore, it merely affirms. (MM 433) Thus, he argues, religious literature isn't doing its job. And he believes that science fiction and fantasy fill the gap that religious literature leaves behind. Those genres provide a distance that allows the reader to step out of his own world and look at things from the outside. Michael Collings relates: "Card argues that the essence of the fantastic is 'belief,' in that the fantastic is effective to the degree that the readers become 'participatory' and embrace for the moment the universe of the story . . . and allow the story to change them." Card chooses to use science fiction and fantasy because they give him room to accomplish his goals. Yet, even within fantastic settings, Card's writings draw material from things much closer to home. He uses autobiography in several different ways in his work, the first of which is as a source of raw material. Card writes what he knows. It's no coincidence that the deep space colony in Speaker for the Dead is populated by Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, or that his work is scattered with such characters; Card performed his missionary work in Brazil, and is thus intimately familiar with the culture and the language. On a less pervasive level, in Maps in a Mirror, he reveals that many of his stories originate in personal experience: "Freeway Games", for example, takes a mostly harmless, pastime from his younger days--a game of 'follow' on the freeway--and carries it to the extreme. Or even more indirectly, in "Clap Hands and Sing" Card takes an youthful experience of lost love and uses it to launch a story totally apart from his own life. He explains, "Since it's much easier to use real events than to make up phony ones, I stole from my own life to find, I hoped, that sense of bittersweet memory that is the stuff of movie romances" (MM 265). Card also uses autobiography to come to grips with elements of his life on a personal level. "Fat Farm" is a deeply perverse story of a man who routinely clones himself new bodies as he destroys the old ones through overindulgence. Card describes the story as "an exercise in self-loathing and desperate hope" after a lifetime of wrestling with his own weight (MM 125). Another poignant example is "Lost Boys". The story blurs the line between fact and fiction by featuring Card himself as the point of view character and lifting its setting directly from his move to Greensboro in 1983. It's full of accurate details and real people and even masquerades as personal anecdote, but it leads up to the death of a son, 'Scotty', who never existed. In the afterword, he relates how a colleague had criticized him, saying he had no right to make the story so autobiographical when he had never felt the pain of losing a child. But when he set out to change the story, to distance it from his own life, he discovered that he couldn't do it. The story, he found, wasn't really about the fictional boy; it was about his own son, Charlie Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and lived severely limited by the disease, unable to live anything approaching a 'normal' life. Writing "Lost Boys" had allowed Card to face emotions that he had overlooked for years: Yet in all the years of Charlie's life, until that day at Sycamore Hill, I had never shed a single tear for him, never allowed myself to grieve. I had worn a mask of calm and acceptance so convincing that I had believed it myself. But the lies we live will always be confessed in the stories we tell, and I am no exception. (MM 119) However, these are hardly traits exclusive to Orson Scott Card; arguably there is no writer who doesn't draw on his own life for material, or who doesn't try to use writing to make sense of problems. But another level of autobiography permeates Card's work from top to bottom. Card weaves his world views into his writing, possibly to an even greater extent than many writers; there is hardly an area of his work untouched by Mormonism. Take his most widely read novel, Ender's Game: the mother of the hero is a Mormon, and though his father is Catholic, not Mormon, both willingly defy population laws by having a third child, Ender. This becomes a major theme of the book, and in the end their third is the one who makes it possible to end such laws, by opening up new worlds to colonize. Though Ender himself isn't Mormon, he makes way for Mormon beliefs, and they shine through him. Another Mormon writer, Eugene England, calls Ender's Game "the crucial moment . . . when Card emerged as our most important and radical Mormon writer" (11). England says that by making Ender both the killer of an alien race and their savior, Card turned him into a Christ-like figure, and "moved firmly into a larger moral and religious world, where issues of diversity, unconditional love for the 'other,' and thus healing through giving and accepting grace, even the Atoning grace of Christ, become central to his work" (12). In some cases, Card claims that the surfacing of his beliefs is unintentional: "As long as I don't interfere with my storytelling, I suspect that my works will always reveal my beliefs. . . . And I believe that such expressions of faith, unconsciously placed in within a story, are the most honest and also the most powerful messages a writer can give" (qtd. in England 08). However, in many of his works, the references to Mormonism are clearly deliberate, as England again points out: the Tales of Alvin Maker series is "a rather thinly veiled fantasy version of Joseph Smith's life", and his Homecoming series is basically the Book of Mormon set in space (10). Card uses autobiography in combination with the freedom of science fiction and fantasy to accomplish his ultimate goal in writing stories. He holds strong opinions and beliefs, and he's always been outspoken about them. This approach, blending the fantastic with the true, allows him to write stories about the things that he truly cares about, simultaneously providing distance and immediacy. Whether the points he makes are compelling is something that must be evaluated by the reader individually, but these, at least, are the devices he uses to make them.
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