Orson Scott Card: Guest of Honor Speech "Fairies in the Garden, Monsters at the
Mall, The Clark Kerr Campus by Humanities/Teacher Education Division
Occasionally my own not-yet-forgotten undergraduate training in semantics surfaces to remind me of the importance of definition, particularly of words we all assume we understand. A word such as "Mythopoeic" is open to a variety of definitions (to say nothing of the even more elusive word fantasy, a word that may be, as the bibliographer E. F. Bleiler writes, "almost all things to all men" (Manlove 1). Even narrowing the field to "mythopoeic fantasy" invites an enormous range of possibilities, including the consensus definition for this conference: "the fiction of the Inklings (J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams); the winners and finalists of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, which is given for works in the spirit of the Inklings; and other books that are to a significant degree like them." (Bratman) While this may be relatively vague, it is as useful or more useful than the standard dictionary definition of mythopoeic as "productive of myths; myth-making." This bare-bones definition is largely un-helpful, as a matter of fact, because many such fantasists do not claim to be actively making myth; rather, they systematically incorporate pre-existing mythic patterns into their works. It would be difficult, for example to appreciate the intricate texturings of a Perelandra without understanding how cultural myth can be interwoven with story; even in a novel as "earthbound" as That Hideous Strength, myths--both ancient and modern, magical and scientific--blend to augment the power of Lewis's storytelling. More recently, Orson Scott Card is among those contemporary writers who have explored the possibilities of mythopoeic fiction from the perspectives of Tolkien and Lewis. In "Fantasy and the Believing Reader," Card argues that the essence of the fantastic is "belief," in that the fantastic is effective to the degree that readers become "participatory" and embrace for the moment the universe of the story--including the myths it asserts--and allow the story to change them. There are, he argues, three ways of "believing" a story: epic, mythic, and critical, re-spelling each to differentiate it from its conventional homonym:
Epick and Mythick do not require conscious decisions to believe; the reader simply accepts or rejects the fundamental assumptions of the story; "The self is named by the story, and so to doubt the story is to rename the self." This differentiation is central to Card's writing, because the approach the reader takes does ultimately effect the way the reader perceives the text: Because critical readers read, not believing, but instead identifying and detaching meanings from the story, they are incapable of properly receiving a story that was written mythickly or epickly: They cannot receive a story that was written from belief. Likewise, mythick and epick readers, because they believe as they do, do not usually discern and detach meanings. The two methods are not compatible." In addition, many stories do not respond well to critickal readings; the story breaks down to mere convention, particularly in fantasy: Critics examine it and find strong-thewed heroes saving damsels in distress, magic rings and prophecies, dark forces opposing the bright light of goodness, and the critics say, "cardboard characters. Endless repetition of meaningless conventions. Hack writing. Childish oversimplification of good and evil. Obviously written for the adolescent mind. Wish-fulfillment. Bourgeois and fascist and sexist and racist. Pure trash." And ah! the most damning epithet of all: "Escapist." But fantasy often exerts power over us precisely because it cannot be reduced to distanced, critical statements of meanings: symbolic, metaphorical, allegorical, or otherwise. Even the "damning epithet" is itself incorporated into the way Card looks at such literature. Negative "escapism" occurs, not in reading mythopoeic fictions, but rather in creating the distanced, dispassionate, analytical and critical readings that sever story from reader: The detached reader is escaping, not from that set of fictions called reality, but from that most dangerous and fearful of all things, the true story. The closest thing to true communication between two human beings is story-telling, for despite his best efforts at concealment, a writer will inevitably reveal in his story the world he believes he lives in, and the participatory reader will forever after carry around in himself and as himself a memory that was partly controlled by that other human being. Such memories are not neatly sorted into fiction and real life in our minds. I know, of course, that I never stood at the Cracks of Doom and watched Gollum die. But that faith in the distinction between my own actions and the actions of fictional characters is merely another story I tell myself. In fact, my memory of that event is much clearer and more powerful than my memory of my fifth birthday. Thus Card, like Lewis and Tolkien, ultimately depends on Myth (with the capital "M," to suggest those patterns of believing that order our perceptions of the universe), not so much to assert a meaning or moral as to communicate stories that become memories that in turn touch upon what he sees as the true underpinnings of those stories--the latter indicated, in part, by the fact that Card's Seventh Sonreceived the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in 1988, with Red Prophet and Prentice Alvin nominees in 1989 and 1990 respectively. Of course, this statement requires that I now attempt the impossible--at least given Card's assertions about the nature of reading and understanding: I must attempt to give a Critickal reading of a writer who approaches Story as Epick and Mythick. Paradoxically, this attempt is made easier by the fact that, while the word mythopoeic might still remain vague, abstract, even ambiguous, two of Card's three ways of believing are fundamentally mythopoeic. Both "Mythick" and "Epick" require a commitment from the participatory reader to coherent patterns of belief that not only inform the story but that also define readers as belonging to specific groups and sharing specific identities. Two interconnecting "epicks" help define Card and his works: the "Epick of Mormonism" and the "Epick of America"; but encompassing both is the most fundamental and far-reaching of all, the "Myth of the Sacrifice." Card has commented that he see himself as an outsider. Critics such as John Clute and Joe Christopher have noted the sense of "self-containment" (Christopher 2) in Lewis's works, the fact that, as an Ulster Protestant born in Catholic Belfast, Lewis belonged to a "surrounded but proselytizing faith" (Clute 244). There is a similar sense of religious isolation in Card. In "On Sycamore Hill," Card talks about how he came to write two short stories in The Folk of the Fringe. One evening, as the rest of a workshop group left for dinner, Card remained behind. He thought at first that he wanted to work on his stories, but the real reason had little to do with an unfinished story; it was in fact his awareness that as a Mormon, he was not truly part of the group: ...this wasn't my community. These guys were Americans, not Mormons; those of us who grew up in Mormon society and remain intensely involved are only nominally members of the American community. We can fake it, but we're always speaking a foreign language....(9) In a very real sense, then, portions of Card's fictions are "epick"--Story that "is received by a group as its own story--as true of that group. " While Card is certainly interested in writing to as large an audience as possible, there is a core of meaning in his work that defines the primary group to which he perceives himself as belonging--these stories tell his "Epicks of Mormonism." Readers are often aware of generally religious implications in Card's fictions. Gareth Rees points out in an online review of The Worthing Chronicle that the novel clearly defines Card's "moral imperative" that pain and grief are necessary for growth: Even if, like me, you find this attitude disturbing and reeking of hypocrisy, we must take it seriously as it is a respectable belief within the Christian community. Indeed, it is perhaps a necessary belief for people otherwise unable to reconcile their belief in a loving and omnipotent God with the state of the world. Viewed in this way, The Worthing Chronicle is an attempt to justify God to His creation, a task that would tax a Milton, and it is not surprising that Card fails. Rees does not accept the story Card is telling and thus, for him as reader, books such as The Worthing Chronicle fail; yet Rees nevertheless recognizes that Card, like Milton (and not coincidentally, Lewis), constructs stories on religious bases that simultaneously lend them power and make them liable to attack from non-believers. Initially, religious elements appeared sporadically in Card's SF/F stories, while Capitol, A Planet Called Treason, and The Worthing Chronicle suggested generalized Mormon references to some readers. By the early 1980s, however, Card's use of the "Epick of Mormonism" became more overt. Between July, 1982 and March, 1983, he combined Mormon themes with the form of Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. Published in an underground newspaper to a limited audience, Notes of a Guardian Angel (chapters 1-6), narrated the trials and growth of a young Mormon boy, and used Lewis's story both as a model and as a literary warrant to incorporate--to borrow Lewis's phrasing--"angels" instead of "space ships" into his fiction. But with Seventh Son (1987), the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner in 1988, Card openly invited a much wider readership to share elements of his own religious heritage. This first volume of the saga of Alvin Miller in an alternate-universe America where magic, science, and religion all work, re-creates as fiction the "Epick" of portions of the Mormon past. Card so seamlessly incorporates episodes based on the early life of Joseph Smith, the first president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that historical motifs become as integral to his story as if he had imagined them. Perhaps the best example of this occurs late in Seventh Son. Young Alvin fractures his leg while trying to save a millstone from breaking (not coincidentally, this stone is literally "carved out of a mountain with no hands" and helps establish Alvin as a "Maker"). Alvin heals his leg but cannot heal a spot of darkness in the bone itself, the signature of the Unmaker--a figure closely allied to Lewis's Un-man in Perelandra. Alvin realizes that the diseased spot must be surgically excised. As his older brother Measure prepares to operate, Alvin refuses wine to dull the pain. "I can stand the pain and hold right still, iffen you whistle," he assures his brother, who successfully removes the bit of bone that otherwise would spread and kill the young Maker. The original of this episode is one of the best known stories in the Mormon community about the early life of Joseph Smith, ideally suited to Card's purposes in Seventh Son--to illustrate Alvin's courage, moral intensity, and spiritual power. Significant details are altered, but the the power of the pattern remains, allowing Card to speak to Mormons and non-Mormons alike in a story informed with specific spiritual and moral values and at the same time equally engaging as an alternate-universe fantasy. The five-part, 1700-page Homecoming series further develops the "Epick of Mormonism." On the planet Harmony, a computer-entity, the Oversoul, manipulates the family of Nafai to leave the city of Basilica and wander for years in the wilderness until they finally arrive at the place where the original colonists arrived 40,000,000 years before and where their ships have remained in stasis, awaiting this moment. Activating the ships, Nafai's group returns to Earth to re-establish humanity on their home planet. Throughout, Card displays his hallmark creativity, peopling both Harmony and Earth with fully developed cultures, both human and alien; generating internal and external discords to complicate Nafai's mission; even exploiting the complexities of time and space as he had done in Capitol, A Planet Called Treason, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide. But underlying what seems a relatively conventional SF plot is something extraordinary. Early in The Memory of Earth (Homecoming, Volume 1), Nafai and his brother glance back down the road from the city gates: "If Nafai and Issib had delayed even ten minutes more they would have had to make this trip in the noise and stink of horses, donkeys, mules, and kurelomi..." (16). Kurelomi is an unusual word, but most SF/Fantasy readers would willingly accept such a nonce word used, apparently, to assert an alien environment. Mormon readers, however, would note that the word echoes a Book of Mormon passage describing an "exceedingly rich" society, where individuals owned horses, asses, and elephants, and "cureloms and cumoms" (Ether 9: 19). Some dozen pages later, when Nafai's father describes a vision sent by the Oversoul concerning the imminent destruction of Basilica and ultimately of the entire planet, there is a moment of recognition potentially as startling as the lamb and the lion passage at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. What Wetchik describes is Lehi's vision of the destruction of Jerusalem, taken from the Book of Mormon. Wetchik and his four sons become analogues to Lehi and his four sons. The Palwashantu Index that Nafai must kill to obtain parallels the Brass Plates of Laban. And from that moment it becomes clear that the plot movement throughout the Homecoming Series is based explicitly on narratives from the Book of Mormon. If incorporating Mormonism were all that Card had attempted in the Homecoming novels or the Alvin Maker series, he would, I think, remain an excellent writer working on a narrow, parochial level. His just presenting Mormon history and theology in fictionalized form would have disturbed many readers, Mormon and non-Mormon alike. One reviewer, in fact, warns that the Alvin Maker series "is lifted, pretty blatantly, from the history of the...Mormon Church.... Alvin Maker is simply Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, and the events in the story--from his anomalous birth, to the Red Prophet, and onwards--are all in the original story of Smith's life." Then, speaking as if all of this were a deeply protected secret, the reviewer concludes, "I'd love to see how Card wraps this all up without people beginning to notice. ("Orson Scott Card: Books") Such comments miss Card's point entirely. Alvin Miller is not just Joseph Smith; The pervasiveness of this level of reading is suggested by the title to Sandra Baliff Straubhaar's review of Seventh Son, "Joseph Smith in an Alternate Universe." Yet nothing in Joseph Smith's life records suggest that he spent a year wandering the wilderness with Tecumseh or that he was present at a cataclysmic battle at Detroit. Nor is there anything in the Book of Mormon to foreshadow the pivotal role of women in the Homecoming series, or the central point that once humans nearly destroy themselves on Earth, this planet will be inherited by evolved rats and bats. To suggest that all Card is doing is re-creating Mormon theology is to argue that all Lewis does in Perelandra is to crib from Genesis and Milton, or that Till We Have Faces is only the Cupid and Psyche myth retold. Such assertions as much ignore the power of Lewis's fiction as they miss the power of Card's. But Card only begins here. Then he moves on to wider implications--to more expansive "epicks" that incorporate wider and wider audiences and tap into the power of more pervasive cultural Myth. The process is best illustrated in the Alvin Maker stories. Seventh Son incorporates much that is narrowly Mormon, but Card also suggests broader interests. Taleswapper mentions Ben Franklin's reputation as a wizard, possibly even a Maker; but Franklin himself claims that "The only thing I ever truly made was Americans" (135). By "Americans" Franklin means more than just people born in a certain geographic location; by re-writing American history, Card illuminates the inner vision of what accepting that name means, justifying Taleswapper's rhetorical question: "Now tell me, Alvin Junior, was old Ben wrong to say that the greatest thing he ever made was a single word?" (Seventh Son 139) The second volume, Red Prophet, departs almost entirely from the "Mormon Epick" of Seventh Son to concentrate on the "Epick of America"--here, the conflict between "Reds" and "Whites." Again, Card's treatment is consciously mythic. His "Reds" have a direct relationship with the Land that no White can ever know, except Alvin (a motif that recurs in "America," in The Folk of the Fringe). This relationship intensifies the mythic relationship suggested in tales about "noble savages" living harmoniously with Nature. Card's "Reds" feel the greensong, and through its power, can call animals for food, run for days without wearying, and enhance their true stewardship over the land. Card is no doubt aware that this version of the story is in part historically untrue; yet he is equally aware of the power of the myth and capitalizes on it, just as Lewis knew even as he was writing Out of the Silent Planet that there were actually no "canals" as such on Mars (Of Other Worlds 50). Card's "Reds" may not reflect historical reality in every detail, but they do reflect one popular version of the myth of America's beginnings. Late in Red Prophet, the prophet, Tenskwa-Tawa, speaks to Alvin's brother, Measure: The bigger a man is, the more people he serves.... A small man serves himself. Bigger is to serve your family. Bigger is to serve your tribe. Then your people. Biggest of all, to serve all men, and all lands. (185) In the Alvin Maker series, Card begins by serving his own tribe, restructuring the story of Joseph Smith in a magical universe. As the series has progressed, however, that focus enlarges until in Red Prophet, Card emphasizes the larger context of the American nation, with its promises of freedom and liberty; and the third volume, Prentice Alvin, deals explicitly with another "Epick of America," the struggle against slavery. While Mormon elements occur, this volume is more directly about what America can and should be; it is about freedom and justice on all levels, from the personal to the public. The Alvin Maker series builds on the "Epick of America" to suggest not only lost opportunities in the past but potentials for the present; it is designed to elicit those remaining elements of greatness in the American Myth of dream and belief. The "Epick of America" and the "Epick of Mormonism" similarly combine in The Folk of the Fringe, originally called "Tales of the Mormon Sea." Card's concern for America-as-Myth permeates the apocalyptic dream-visions of "America" and the carefully crafted theatricality of Glory of America, performed in "Pageant Wagon," as he forges these two mythic strands into one Story: it seemed a little strange that a show called Glory of America should have an equal mix of Mormon and American history. But to these people ... it was all the same story. George Washington, Betsy Ross, Joseph Smith, Abraham Lincoln, Brigham Young, all part of the same unfolding tale. Their own past. (210-211) The pageant defines the Myths that holds one community together. Card is not proselytizing for either, neither the truthfulness of Mormonism nor the sanctity of the America Dream. Instead, he creates a story about community that combines these Myths into a single entity. As the Glory of America ends, ...the shouting faded, the clapping became more scattered. The faint audience lights came on. A few voices, talking, began among the crowd. The applause was over. The unity was broken. The audience was once again the thousand citizens of Hatchville.... This is the power of Myth--the power to weld participants into a single community of structured memory and vicarious experience. In some cases, Card writes specifically for Mormon readers who will understand the full power of Card's images; in others, he writes specifically for Americans, who will recognize the power of the Myth of America, regardless of how far it might diverge from present reality; and, in stories such as "America," Red Prophet, and the Homecoming series, Card even warns readers of dangers to the integrity of those Myths. In Red Prophet, Tenskwa-Tawa sees an America divided, with Reds in the west and Whites in the East. In all other visions, the Red men dwindled, confined to tiny preserves of desolate land, until the whole land was White, and therefore brutalized into submission, stripped and cut and ravished, giving vast amounts of food that was only in imitation of the true harvest, poisoned into life by alchemical trickery. Even the White man suffered in those visions of the future, but it would be many generations before he realized what he had done. Yet here--Prophetstown--there was a day--tomorrow--when the future could be turned onto an unlikely path, but a better one. One that would lead to a living land after all, even if it was truncated; one that would lead someday to a crystal city catching sunlight and turning it into visions of truth for all who lived within it. (234) In the vision of Tenskwa-Tawa, there is hope; in the America of the 1990s, we already live in the hopeless, desolate, dying land the Red Prophet struggled to avoid. Card's exploration of mythic power extends beyond these "Epicks" of Mormonism and of America, however. Even earlier than his overt embracing of Mormonism and America as themes, he had asserted more encompassing mythic patterns. As the Red Prophet said, the greatest service is to "serve all men, and all lands." Among Card's earliest stories are a number that attempt to tell stories that touch on some of the most important Stories. In "Ender's Game" (1977), "Kingsmeat" (1978), "Hart's Hope (1980), and "The Porcelain Salamander" (1981), and others, Card investigates the "Myth of the Sacrifice," the mediator, the advocate, the Christ-figure. These stories are sometimes harsh and brutal, since he is concerned not simply with easy answers but with difficult realities, particularly when the sacrificial figure is only partially, or perhaps not at all understood by the ones who need salvation. The epitome of the sacrificial Christic figure in Card's fiction is Ender Wiggin, whose very existence meets the needs of the larger community, and whose career as military genius, as itinerant interplanetary mediator and advocate, as apostle to aliens, and as human link with the generative powers of God (emphasized in the title of the fourth volume, Children of the Mind) is based on serving larger and larger communities. As such, these stories anatomize the role of mediators--most often Ender Wiggin but occasionally others as well--in an attempt at understanding the psychological and spiritual dimensions of sacrifice within the context of Christic imagery and meaning. These novels occasionally discuss God overtly but they are essentially about atonement, sacrifice, mediation, and their effects on community. Episode after episode in Ender's Game resonates with Christic, Biblical meaning, as when Ender as savior of humanity is aided by the chosen twelve closest to him and most capable of carrying out his mission (217); when, following the destruction of the buggers' home planet, Ender descends into the darkness of quasi-death for five days, during which he sees, understands, and accepts the consequences of his actions (330-332); and finally when, with the defeat of humanity's perceived enemies, he becomes "The child-god, the miracle worker, with life and death in his hands" (338). By the end of the novel, Ender has come as close as is humanly possible to being a Christ-figure, sacrificing all to save all, accepting the responsibility of a billion, billion deaths (311). In Speaker for the Dead, Ender is now quasi-immortal; through time-space dilation, he has aged only a few years while 3,000 years have passed for the rest of humanity. Again, Ender is explicitly linked with messianic, mediational functions. To his sister's children, he is "their long-lost Uncle Ender, who was thought in every world to be a monster, but in reality was something of a savior, or a prophet, or at least a martyr" (88). He is the apostle to the piggies, who recognize his Christic function. Most significantly, he must witness the compact between humans and piggies by reversing his role from Ender's Game. Instead of being the sacrifice, he must sacrifice the alien named Human. To Ender's bitter comment that he is "cold and ruthless" enough to solidify the covenant in the only way the piggies will accept, Novinha responds that he is also "Compassionate enough_to put the hot iron into the wound when that's the only way to heal it." And, as Ender understands, "As one who had felt his burning iron cauterize her deepest wounds, she had the right to speak; and he believed her, and it eased his heart for the bloody work ahead" (374). He performs a passage into Life-after-Death that Human and others describe in terms of miracles and covenants, sacrament and resurrection, brotherhood and ascent into the light (380-381, 384). In the words of Bishop Peregrino, the Speaker's interference with the established structure of things on Lusitania has turned into revelation: It was the miracle of the wafer, turned into the flesh of God in his hands. How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust. (385) Even before Xenocide was published, Card acknowledged that the sequel to Speaker for the Dead would be difficult to write: ...it will be even more different from the first two than Speaker was from Ender. It's cosmic Sci-Fi--discovering what everything is made of, what underlies the laws of the universe, that sort of thing. (Shirk 12) "Cosmic Sci-Fi"--the same kind of Story that Lewis weaves in the Ransom novels, as we gradually understand the connections among all things within the Fields of Arbol, through Maleldil as creator. Card's discussions of philotes and philotic webs seem intended less as scientific, extrapolative suggestions about the actual functioning of universe and meta-universe than as metaphorical ways of defining the underlying Myth of creation and generation that shape his stories, especially the Story of Ender Wiggin, "sometimes monster, always something of a savior, or a prophet, or at least a martyr." To varying degrees, Card's readership has responded to the power of Myth as it percolates through the Stories that embodies it. Yet the same acknowledgement of mythic power also makes these novels vulnerable to attack. As happens occasionally in Lewis studies, critics who do not accept Card's Myths as true may have difficulty accepting the Stories Card uses to define them, as when the Ender novels are rejected as neo-Hitlerian, male-oriented power-fantasies perpetrated by a misogynistic, myopic, militaristic anti-feminist (Radford); or when A Woman of Destiny is written off as a predictably formulaic romance (Quaglia). But for readers open to the Myths these writers explore, the Stories become things of enormous potential. And, in their own way, the Myths become means by which more difficult books can be approached and understood. Much like Lewis's That Hideous Strength,Card's most recent single-volume novel has elicited strong criticism for doing what it should not and for not doing what it apparently should. Yet, when one looks at it closely, Lost Boys (1992) is a logical conclusion thus far to Card's interlocking approach to three essential Mythic patterns. Lost Boys seems on the surface a far cry from mythopoeic fantasy. In fact, most of it seems barely fantastic at all; only in the final pages does Card leave the world as we know it and enter another world, where Myth becomes Reality; but even there, he makes it clear that terms such as fantasy and reality are only relative in this novel. As Step Fletcher says about his son's apparent problems facing reality, "It's the real world that he's living in, only just as we thought, he sees it more deeply and truly than the rest of us" (376). In addition, long portions of the novel discuss the mundane concerns of making a living, of defining relationships, both family and social, of home and school and job. One reader writes that the novel is simply about a "struggling computer programmer with a strong religious_background and a son who is having weird experiences with video games. I really was caught up in the trials and tribulations of the programmer's life, but the subplot of the boy is always kinda [sic] creepy in the background" ("Bob's Books"). Another reviewer, summarizes the novel as being about "a family who lose a difficult child to a murderer, but when he comes back as a ghost they are able to give him the perfect Christmas he never had when he was alive_" (Rees). Both responses are fundamentally inaccurate. Stevie's story is not a quirky sub-plot; it is the rationale for the entire novel, with Step Fletcher's difficulties at work defining one of several reasons why Step is unable to rescue his son until too late. The novel discusses Mormons and Mormonism, but not in the sense that its purpose is to convince readers that Mormonism is true; instead, religion illuminates Stevie's decisions, particularly his need to stop a vicious, spreading evil. And the Fletchers do not merely give Stevie "the perfect Christmas he never had when he was alive" (which is simply false to the novel); but rather their child finds the strength to bring one final, nearly "perfect" Christmas to the families of a killer's innocent victims. By rejecting Card's underlying Myths, these readers miss the power of the novel. It becomes merely, as one reader said recently, a very sad book. The case is complicated by the fact the short story "Lost Boys" is a radically different story than the novel. This becomes immediately apparent in the tone of the original opening paragraphs: >L1>Kristine and the kids and I moved to Greensboro on the first of March, 1983. I was happy enough about my job--I just wasn't sure I wanted a job at all. But the recession had the publishers all panicky, and nobody was coming up with advances large enough to take a decent amount of time writing a novel. I suppose I could whip out 75,000 words of junk fiction every month and publish them under half a dozen pseudonyms or something, but it seemed to Kristine and me that we'd do better in the long run if I got a job to ride out the recession. Besides, my Ph.D. was down the toilet. I'd been doing good work at Notre Dame, but when I had to take out a few weeks in the middle of a semester to finish Hart's Hope, the English department was about as understanding as you'd expect from people who prefer their authors dead or domesticated. Can't feed your family? So sorry. You're a writer? Ah, but not that anyone's written a scholarly essay about. So long, boy-oh! ("Lost Boys" 73-74) This does not sound like the opening to a fiction; this is Orson Scott Card talking about his own life, his own family, his own frustrations. The story continues in this way for several more paragraphs, providing insights into Card's biography. Only with the introduction of an oldest child, "Scotty," does the story assert itself as fiction; Scotty is the vehicle by which Card tells a Story that is, in essence, his own "Epick," his own Myth. When he took the story to the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop, it was sharply criticized. Card quotes Karen Fowler as saying, "By telling this story in first person with so much detail from your own life, you've appropriated something that doesn't belong to you. You've pretended to feel the grief of a parent who has lost a child, and you don't have a right to feel that grief" ("Lost Boys" 89). Card's response is that "Lost Boys" contains a private Myth. Responding to Fowler's comments, Card discovered that This story wasn't about a fictional eldest child named "Scotty." It was about my real-life youngest child, Charlie Ben. The story added a new dimension to Card's use of Myth by allowing him to include himself directly in confronting a truth that defines his life as a father. When Card expanded the story into a novel, that private myth retreated. Step and DeAnne Fletcher replaced Scott and Kristine; Stevie, Robbie, and Betsy replaced "Scotty," Geoffrey, and Emily; the new child was Jeremy Zapata Fletcher instead of Charlie Ben. But Lost Boys retained touches of Card's private Story. The Cards moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, while the Fletchers moved to Steuben, North Carolina; but significantly the Fletchers set out from Vigor, Illinois--echoing Vigor Church near the Hatrack River area that Card used as a landscape for the Alvin Maker novels. (One indication of how widely Card's Epick of America" has been accepted is the existence of a computer-network virtual community on America Online based on the history, geography, even linguistic patterns of Card's Hatrack River [Jacobs]). Even as Card removes Orson Scott Card as character from the story, he replaced him with allusions to Orson Scott Card, author of other books that begin the process of exploration and discovery continued in Lost Boys. Beyond this personal level, Lost Boys also illustrates Card's three consistent themes. The "Epick of Mormonism" is specifically represented. Throughout, Card provides his insights into the practical, everyday workings of a religion that, for him, is the focus of his life and his family's lives. He is so persistent in providing these details that it is easy to see why readers might feel that he is proselytizing; but the Mormon references are so functional, so integrated to the narrative that re-reading the short-story version, where religion is rarely mentioned, reveals a thinness that mere word count cannot explain. For Step and DeAnne Fletcher, religion is real. Blessings work. Prophecy is possible. Prayers can be answered, although not always in the ways one might either wish or expect. Thus, they of all people should be prepared when Scotty's life is touched by transcendence. Yet initially they fail their own beliefs. In That Hideous Strength, Lewis's Mother Dimble can kneel in evening prayer, before a near stranger, without any embarrassment; Card's Step finds it more difficult to do so. And in spite of their frequent contact with the spiritual, both Step and DeAnne persist on defining Stevie's "problem" in secular terms, including sending him to a psychiatrist, only to find that Dr. Weeks wants to cure Stevie of his religion, since she sees it as fostering an unhealthy mental state; yet she encourages her own son to associate with the Mormons, since among them his obsession with obtaining invisible powers and becoming a god will pass (she hopes) relatively unnoticed. Still, the Mormonism remains secondary to other concerns. The novel is set in contemporary America. If in Red Prophet Tenskwa-Tawa has a horrific vision of a land poisoned and dying, devastated by the Whites, Step Fletcher lives in that vision. He brings his pregnant wife to a town enveloped by fumes from nearby tobacco factories; DeAnne constantly battles nausea because of the stench. His home is invaded several times by hordes of insects--june bugs, spiders, roaches; each time, the insects are seeking to escape a violation of the land as the killer buries yet another young victim in the dirt beneath the Fletcher's home. Even the steps taken to rid the house of the insects are themselves poisonous, the residue of the insecticide forcing the Fletchers out of their house and ironically inviting the killer inside. And, most tragic of all, their world is a world of deception, greed, anger, and evil. A fellow Mormon, who should have provided strength and support for the new family in the area, perverts religion to her own end, frightening young Stevie with self-serving "prophecies" and false "blessings." The teacher who should have helped Stevie develop ties with his new community ridicules him to bolster her own self-importance. A young man who offers to babysit the Fletchers' children turns out to be a sex offender so near being a mere "creature" that Step hesitates even to speak his children's names when the man can hear. And, of course, at the center of the plot is the serial killer, the murderer of young boys, whose actions impel Stevie's need to redeem the killer's victims. This is the America of reality, a place where Myth dissipates, a place already well on the way to the devastation and defeat that opens The Folk of the Fringe. Yet even here there are remnants of hope: new-found friends provide comfort and community; and by believing the unbelievable, a police investigator confirms the meaning of Stevie's sacrifice. In the end, the place that saw the difficult birth of one son and the death another becomes the community the Fletchers had been seeking: Step and DeAnne buried their oldest boy in a cemetery on the western edge of Steuben, surrounded by thick woods full of birds and animals, a living place. They both knew as they stood beside the grave that their days of wandering were through. They had been anchored now in Steuben, both by the living and the dead. Little Jeremy would enter Open Doors [Clinic] when the time came; flowers would be tended on this grave. (447) If Lost Boys remained merely an extended version of one man's private story, a story about the workings of a specific religion, or even a story about what America has become, then the novel would indeed be just "a very sad story." But there is more. Card's works, no matter how terrible, frightening, sad, or even apparently inconclusive struggle to move beyond the family, the tribe, even the people, to "serve all men, and all lands," and Lost Boys is no exception. This novel works because each level is an inherent part of something larger. And structuring the story is the Myth of Sacrifice. Stevie is not just a "problem child" who sees imaginary friends, plays phantom video games, and ignores his parents. He is a vehicle by which Card can mourn his own "lost boy"--yes: but on a much larger scale, he is an icon for innocence and purity; as Detective Douglas says: there's some people who do things so bad it tears at the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing. I think that's what's been happening to your boy. What's going on here in Steuben is so evil and he is so good and pure that he can't help but feel it. The minute he got to Steuben he must have felt it, and it made him sad.... The rest of us, we've got good and evil mixed up in us, and our own badness makes so much noise we can't hear the evil of the monster out there. But your Stevie, he can hear it. He can hear the names of the boys [and]... your Stevie takes those names, and he makes friends out of them. (374) Douglas is close to the truth, but even he does not fully understand that Stevie achieves more than just naming the lost boys. In a climactic exchange, Step threatens to ban Stevie from the computer, Stevie's main connection with the lost boys. "You can't," Stevie cried, "That's the only thing they're staying for! If I can't play they'll go away!" (410). Step answers that maybe the boy is spending entirely too much time playing Atari. "Not as much as you spend on the IBM in there," said Stevie. Several pages later, DeAnne makes the correct connection, even though neither she nor Step understands it completely: "The funniest thing," said DeAnne. "You know when he said, 'You're not the only one with work to do?' or whatever it was he said?" At this point Lost Boys ceases to be merely a sad book and becomes a powerful one, because Stevie is pure and good and perceives the tear in the world_and he has the courage to act to stop it. Through his courage, he can hold onto the lost boys long enough to teach them one thing that brings hope out of tragedy: how to be seen. It is not an accident that the story closes on Christmas, nor is it as one reader suggests a "schmalzy" manipulative ploy on Card's part (Rees), any more than it is a schmalzy manipulative ploy on Lewis's part to signal the collapse of the White Witch's power by the appearance of Father Christmas. Instead, at the season of Birth and Hope, the lost boys both give and receive a final gift: As Bappy [the killer] was led away, as the bodies were brought out of their hidden graves and under the police lights of that bitter cold Christmas Eve, one by one the boys inside the house no longer had the strength or the need to keep trying anymore, and they said good-bye, and they were gone. One moment there, the next moment not there. Then their parents left, weeping, clinging to each other, with just a whispered word or two from Douglas. "Tell no one," he said. "You don't want your boy's name in the press. Just go home and thank God you had a chance to say good-bye. One small mercy in this whole cruel business." And the parents nodded and agreed and went home to the loneliest Christmas of their lives, the Christmas in which questions were answered at last, and love was remembered and wept for, and God was thanked and blamed for not having done more. (442) This is a tremendous weight for one boy, one Story, to bear; and Card's control comes perilously close to breaking. Yet I think that control does hold; the story does ultimate imitate the deeper, brighter Story that Card wants to tell. There may in fact be "monsters in the mall"--evil close to us, unseen and unidentifiable except for its consequences; but there are also those willing to sacrifice in order to bring that evil into the light and defeat it. Card gives us the externals--an apparently disturbed child, whose parents struggle to find clues as to how to cure him--with the resolution only becoming fully understandable at the end of the story. With Stevie's parents, readers are invited to watch him make difficult decisions; yet the readers do not understand his preliminary decisions any more than Step and DeAnne do. The intensity and power of Stevie's sacrifice requires that it be revealed at precisely the correct moment, transforming what had seemed to be a "realistic" novel into a deeply "mythopoeic" one. In speaking about the eucatastrophe of fairy stories, Tolkien provides a paradigm for the final effect of a story such as Lost Boys: The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn" (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially "escapist," nor "fugitive." In its fairy-tale--or otherworld--setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. ( "On Fairy Stories" 68) In its final pages, Card's text emphasizes the effects of this pattern: the sudden "turn" that, far from providing emotional closure, reveals that on more fundamentally mythic levels, the story opens outward, inviting readers "farther in and farther up"; the "sudden and miraculous grace" that brings consolation by intruding the supernatural into the frighteningly real world Card has re-created, a world of serial killers and missing children. And the final paragraphs of Lost Boys provides precisely the emotional response that Tolkien defines: It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to the child or man that hears it, when the "turn" comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art. ("On Fairy Stories" 68-69) Works Cited and Consulted "Bob's Books" Netscape. July 1995. Available at info@webcrawler.com. Bratman, David. Internet memo. 15 June 1995. Card, Orson Scott. "America." Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (January, 1987): 22-53. --- "Author's Note: On Sycamore Hill." The Folk of the Fringe. Bloomfield MI: Phantasia Press, 1989 (cloth); New York: Tor, 1990, p. 274-300. See also "On Sycamore Hill." --- The Call of Earth: Homecoming Volume 2. 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