quote:The thing is that once you take us to that level, once you create that frankly intimate connection with a character, "drawing the curtain" on certain acts seems odd and disconnected. It's not that it didn't happen and it's not that I can't imagine it.
I quite agree. The reader expects the narrator to apply certain filters to the lives of their characters. By far the most important of these is that things that have relevance to the plot, in the widest sense, should be included, while things that don't should be excluded. Mostly, a character's going to the toilet is quite irrelevant, so nobody will mind if those experiences are not mentioned, all considerations of propriety aside. However, this cannot be said for romantic encounters, obviously. Those are often among the key elements in character development. There may of course be a number of valid reasons to skip such a scene, but those should become clear later on in the narrative. If that doesn't happen, it leaves me with the impression that the writer is telling me "they had sex, but it didn't matter much". That may not be what they are aiming at, but it's the impression it creates.
In a way, I guess I'd prefer a flowery phrase like "drawing the curtain" to simply letting such a scene fade out, because by breaking the fourth wall and giving us the nudge-nudge-wink-wink, the aforementioned impression is, to an extent, avoided.
As to the other type of scene Card mentions, I really can't follow his reasoning. Most people have never directly experienced real, severe, deliberate violence. All they have to fuel their imaginations are fictional accounts. So, if those accounts in turn want the readers to fill in the details here for themselves, where are those supposed to come from? To give an example, most adventure stories involving stealth missions of some kind (warrior of tribe A sneaks into tribe B's camp, British commando infiltrates Nazi installation, whatever) have someone cutting someone else's throat. Until quite recently, my only referent for how I should imagine this sort of killing was the way it's portrayed in most movies - a trickle of blood, eyes bulging for a moment, then quick unconsciousness and/or death. I guess I should know enough anatomy to make me realize that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I never really questioned it anyway. Then, a few years ago, I watched one of those Al-Qaeda beheading vidoes. Yikes. Not tidy. Not quiet. Not quick. Human body just doesn't die easily. After having nightmares and bitterly regretting that decision for a few weeks, I took at least something worthwhile out of it - a different set of details to fill in fictional scenes of this kind with.
Card sort of makes it sound like the depiction of evil is evil in itself, and, vice versa, the avoidance of such depictions virtuous in itself. That is, of course, nonsense, or a half-truth at best. A realistically violent scene will horrify most people, thus impressing that violence is to be avoided. A scene that pretends violence is not a big deal, like those Hollywood-staple throat-slitting ones, can easily be used to portray violence as an acceptable means to fulfilling some personal quest. Need I say which one of these messages I think is the evil one?!
Posts: 96 | Registered: Jun 2009
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kassyopeia, have you read Card's earlier fiction, say, Treason or Maps in a Mirror? Card was blasted for years for showing too much sex and violence. And he has explicitly denied Plato's old idea that depicting evil is evil in and of itself, so you're not arguing against him...
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quote:Card was blasted for years for showing too much sex and violence. And he has explicitly denied Plato's old idea that depicting evil is evil in and of itself, so you're not arguing against him...
Yes, I find most of Card's descriptions of violence to be rather explicit. The comment above was on the fact that in the interview we were discussing, he seems to be taking the stance that what needs justification is the explicitness of the description, not the inclusion of the violence pre se. That's where he's losing me.
Posts: 96 | Registered: Jun 2009
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also the age gap between Bean and petra confuses me. wasn't she like 6 years older than him?
It confused me, too. When they got married, bean was like, what sixteen or younger? (At least that's what it said in Children of the Mind.) If they were a few years older it wouldn't have been a big deal but he was still a teenager while Petra was in her twenties, which is kind of weird despite Bean's intelligence and genetic condition.
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quote:Originally posted by Synesthesia: Mostly it's all about reproduction, which isn't really all that sexy.
I think that's true. In most of the books I've read, Orson Scott Card depicts sex as being about contributing to the survival of the human race, which is, I have to admit, pretty much the whole point when you think about it scientifically. But he also writes about lust and longing (especially from a man/boy's point of view), and as a teenage girl, that's enough sex for me. Posts: 30 | Registered: Aug 2009
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So a question arises from this discussion. All of the graphic stuff people are mentioning, he wrote early in his career. I remember reading Ender's Game about 15 years ago, then voraciously reading everything else he had written. Some of the stuff is pretty shocking, like Wyrms and Hart's Hope, not to mention Songmaster. Saints, even. I was young, but there was quite a lot of screwing, with some scenes I still remember over a decade later. I can't think of anything that he wrote after that Lovelock nonsense (the climax of the book is a masturbating monkey? No wonder he dropped the series) that had the same oomph. Not in terms of violence, cruelty, sex, etc. Am I wrong, or did Card lose his edge somewhere?
Posts: 6 | Registered: Sep 2009
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It's not unusual for people to grow more conservative as they get older. If, in Card's case, more conservative means taking his religion more seriously, that would certainly explain why his work got tamer.
What bothers me more, personally, is something related which has been observed by many on these boards: He increasingly builds stories around some overt moral message, rather than just tell the most interesting tale he can come up with (and he was and probably still is bloody good at coming up with interesting stuff) and leave the ethical interpretations up to the reader. IMO, irrespective of genre, the best stories are always those that follow the spirit of Twain's dictum:
quote: PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
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I couldn't read Hart's Hope. I only just tried to read it this summer and it was just so completely not what I had come to expect from Card that I decided to put it down and retain my current opinion of his work.
Posts: 2392 | Registered: Sep 2005
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Hart's hope was a bit much, but in my opinion, his darkest was definitely Songmaster. Which is not to say that I don't like them. I do.
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Hart's Hope was a totally different style than what we're used to seeing from OSC. However, it's not really that much darker than many of his short stories!
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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