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Literature and Belief, Volume 23.2
Subversion and Containment in Orson Scott Card's Xenocide
by Daniel K. Mulhestein
Xenocide (1991) is a peculiar book. Although it
occupies the space between Speaker for the Dead (1986)
and Children of the Mind (1996) in Orson Scott Card's
canon, much of the plot of Xenocide revolves around a
cluster of characters new to the saga, and the book's
emotional center of gravity is less Ender Wiggin than
Han Qing-jao. Further, although Xenocide received a
Hugo nomination, its critical reception has been
surprisingly mixed, with one reviewer grumbling about
the book's "frequent, irksome, and inter- minable
theological/philosophical interludes" (rev. of
Xenocide 699). But if Kirkus Reviews was partly in the
right, it was also wholly in the wrong: the most
perplexing thing about Xenocide is not the sudden
emergence of some grand theology but rather the way in
which that theology is employed. More than any other
novel in the Ender Wiggin series, Xenocide wrestles
with fundamental questions of faith and free will. And
it does so by way of a rhetorical strategy that is
interesting and powerful but not always entirely
successful. This strategy is not new; it can be found
in texts ranging from Beowulf to Ulysses (1922). But
the critic who describes it most succinctly is the New
Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, whose essay
"'Invisible Bullets': Renaissance Authority and its
Subversion" is thus a helpful place to begin an
exploration of what goes wrong----and right----in Xenocide.
Helpful and oddly appropriate, Greenblatt writes from
within the Marxist tradition, and Card's novel
describes a civilization whose roots go back to Mao
Tse-tung.
I
In "'Invisible Bullets'" Greenblatt describes a
process commonly called "subversion and containment."
Many apparently orthodox cultural texts, he observes,
plant the seeds of revolution. They describe something
or do something which poses a potential threat to an
important aspect of the culture of which they are a
part----a threat to a dominant institution, perhaps, or
to a prevailing ideology. In that sense they are
subversive texts. King Lear (1608)----to choose an
obvious example----is a subversive play insofar as it
calls into question the ideology of the divine right
of kings and describes the carnage that follows a king
gone awry. At the same time, Greenblatt explains, such
texts work overtime to control the subversion they are
creating, to lock it down, to contain it in the sense
in which a prison contains a prisoner. They create a
threat in order to destroy it, and in doing so they
reinforce the very ideologies and institutions that
they put at risk. Thus, King Lear----to continue the
example----subverts the notion of kingship precisely in
order to reaffirm it. But if King Lear represents
subversion and containment at work, Xenocide shows
subversion and containment gone astray.
The novel describes the life, death, and rebirth of a
religious community comprised of the people of Path.
At the center of their religious life are the
godspoken: men and women to whom the gods are said to
manifest themselves through what appear to be
obsessive-compulsive disorders. In the Catalogue of
Voices of the Gods, for example, Door-Waiting,
Counting-to-Multiples-of-Five, Object-Counting,
Checking-for-Accidental-Murders, Fingernail-Tearing,
Skin-Scraping, Pulling-Out-of-Hair, Gnawing-at-Stone,
and Bugging-Out-of-Eyes are all identified as penances
demanded by the gods, rituals of obedience which
cleanse the souls of the godspoken so that the gods
can fill their minds with wisdom (51). In spite of the
odd nature of their religious rituals, however, the
people of Path face many of the same challenges
encountered by other----more earthbound----religious
communities: they must translate evidence of divinity
into rules of conduct, they must mediate between
science and religion and between religion and
politics, and they must find a way to transmit their
faith from one generation to the next. In these
respects the people of Path are like people of faith
everywhere.
In describing the people of Path, Xenocide explores a
number of important philosophical issues, including
the nature of education, of history, and of obedience.
In the process it tests----and appears to prove as
true----four subversive hypotheses about the nature of
religion. The first hypothesis is the same one
Greenblatt discusses in his reading of Thomos Harlot's
A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land
of Virginia (1588): it is the Machiavellian theory
that religion is a political tool of the ruling class.
Early in Xenocide the link between obedience to the
gods and obedience to the government is stated----in
positive terms----by Han Fei-tzu, the most honored of the
godspoken. In the following passage he is conversing
with his daughter, Qing-jao, who has just discovered
that he has been lying to the people of Path on behalf
of the political rulers: "Just as the gods speak only
to a chosen few," declares Han Fei-tzu,
"so the secrets of the rulers must be known only to
those who will use the knowledge properly. . . . The
only way to retrieve a secret, once it is known, is to
replace it with a lie; then the knowledge of the truth
is once again your secret.". . .
"If we can lie in the service of the gods, what
other crimes can we commit?"
"What is a crime?"
"An act that's against the law."
"What law?"
"I see----Congress makes the law, so the law is
whatever Con-gress says. But Congress is composed of
men and women, who may do good and evil."
"Now you're nearer the truth. We can't do crimes in
the service of Congress, because Congress makes the
laws. But if Congress ever became evil, then in
obeying them we might also be doing evil. . . .
However, if that happened, Congress would surely lose
the mandate of heaven. And we, the godspoken, don't
have to wait and wonder about the mandate of heaven,
as others do. If Congress ever loses the mandate of
the gods, we will know at once."
"So you lied for Congress because Congress had the
mandate of heaven."
"And therefore I knew that to help them keep their
secret was the will of the gods for the good of the
people." (90--91)
Midway through Xenocide, however, Han Fei-tzu becomes
convinced there is no heaven, there is no mandate, and
the way of Path is a lie propagated by a tyrannical
government. He becomes convinced, in short, of the
Machiavellian view of religion: "[W]e, the godspoken,"
cries Han Fei-Tzu, "are not hearing gods at all. We
have been altered genetically . . . [to perform
absurd, humiliating rituals]----and the only reason I can
think of is that it keeps us under control, keeps us
weak. . . . It's a monstrous crime. . . . We are the
slaves here! Congress is our most terrible enemy, our
masters, our deceivers" (289). Perhaps more
importantly, Han Fei-tzu's conclusions about the way
of Path are shared by Ender Wiggin, the protagonist in
the series and the character who typically articulates
Card's perspective. Subsequent events----including the
release of a virus which cures the godspoken of their
behavior----appear to justify both Han Fei-tzu's
assertions and Machiavelli's theory. Indeed, only one
of the godspoken----Qing-jao----continues to believe that
her obsessive-compulsive behavior is a form of
purification sent by the gods. Her continued faith,
however, ultimately serves a subversive function as
well, for it points toward----and seems to prove true----a
second subversive hypothesis about the nature of
religion.
This hypothesis concerns the power of hegemony,
especially religious hegemony. In his Prison Notebooks
(1947) Antonio Gramsci defines hegemony in terms of
class warfare. A given class can gain power, he says,
by consent as well as coercion (in Anderson 20--25).
It can do this by disseminating its particular
class-based ideology throughout society and then
persuading the other classes to accept that ideology
as the Truth. Universalize, naturalize, and conquer,
Gramsci insists (Anderson 19). Later critics have
built upon Gramsci's theory, and today the term
hegemony means something like "a society's dominant
system of meanings, practices, and values." Hegemony
is what most people believe; it also describes how
most people act. Hegemony is more than mere ideology;
it is ideology in action, ideology put into practice
by its believers. And when people live an ideology as
the Truth, they generally do so in a very specific
way: they attempt to act upon their beliefs in
precisely such a way as to ensure that their actions
ratify their beliefs. They act----that is to say----in such
a way as to confirm reciprocally the validity of their
beliefs, whether those beliefs are true or not. Hence
the equation: Hegemony = Ideology + Action +
Reciprocal Confirmation.
The story of Qing-jao is a textbook example of
religious hegemony at work. Her most important
ideology is her belief that the gods speak through
her. Her most important actions are those of
obedience, of living properly the life of a godspoken.
Those actions ratify her ideology and confirm her
belief that she is an instrument of the gods. And the
lynchpin in this process is a binary formula which
juxtaposes religion and science, thus viewing
scientific theories and evidence as a heaven-sent
screen or cover, a divinely inspired way of concealing
the deeper truth of religion. Her father first states
this binary formula: "The gods are the cause of
everything that happens," he observes, "but they never
act except in disguise"----the disguise being the
fortuitous appearance of a scientific explanation
(148). The belief that the gods hide their actions
from unbelievers behind a cloud of natural laws and
scientific explanations thus becomes the defining
tenet of Qing-jao's faith: "Qing-jao knew that she
must listen [to the scientific explanations] with one
question in mind: What do the gods mean by this?"
(292). On the basis of this tenet Qing-jao transforms
scientific evidence that Congress manipulated her
genes into spiritual evidence of the handiwork of the
gods. Every proof that the government engineered her
obsessive-compulsive behavior reciprocally confirms
Qing-jao's belief that the hands of the gods were upon
her and that the gods are using science to conceal
their work. The more the scientists prove her wrong,
the harder she works to transform their critique into
proof.
When presented with evidence of genetic manipulation,
for example, Qing-jao retorts, "Don't you see? This
genetic difference in us----it's the disguise the gods
have given for their voices in our lives. So that
people who are not of the Path will still be free to
disbelieve" (290). When she is infected with a virus
designed to counteract the effects of the genetic
manipulation, she reasons:
And if the gods wished to stop speaking to the people
of Path, then this might well be the disguise they had
chosen for their act. Let it seem to the unbeliever
that Father's Lusitanian virus cuts us off from the
gods; I will know, as will all other faithful men and
women, that the gods speak to whomever they wish, and
nothing made by human hands could stop them if they so
desired. All their acts were vanity. If Congress
believed that they had caused the gods to speak on
Path, let them believe it. If Father and the
Lusitanians believe that they are causing the gods to
fall silent, let them believe it. I know that if I am
only worthy of it, the gods will speak to me. (581)
Even when the virus produces its intended effect and
causes Qing-jao to lose her disorder, after a moment
of agonizing doubt she interprets the success of the
virus as yet another evidence of the gods' hidden
power. By this point in the novel "[s]he could not
bear [her father's] embrace," for he has rejected the
way of Path, and he is the one who has infected her
with the virus----
She could not endure it because it would mean his
complete victory. It would mean that she had been
defeated by the enemies of the gods. . . . It would
mean that all Qing-jao's worship for all these years
had meant nothing. . . . It would mean that Mother was
not waiting for her when at last she came to the
Infinite West.
Why don't you speak to me, O Gods! she cried out
silently. Why don't you assure me that I have not
served you in vain all these years? Why have you
deserted me now, and given the triumph to your
enemies?
And then the answer came to her, as simply and
clearly as if her mother had whispered the words in
her ear: This is a test, Qing-jao. The gods are
watching what you do.
A test. Of course. The gods were testing all their
servants on Path, to see which ones were deceived and
which endured in perfect obedience.
If I am being tested, then there must be some
correct thing for me to do. . . . She dropped to her
knees. She found a woodgrain line, and began to trace
it [which is her obsessive-compulsive behavior].
There was no answering gift of release, no sense of
rightness; but that did not trouble her, because she
understood that this was part of the test. (587--88)
In its description of Qing-jao, then, Xenocide both
tests and appears to prove true a second subversive
hypothesis about religion: that a religious hegemony
can become so powerful it can transform even
contradictory evidence into confirmation of belief. To
ensure that readers do not somehow miss the point,
Ender spells it out for them:
Qing-jao, I know you well, thought Ender. You are
such a bright one, but the light you see by comes
entirely from the stories of your gods. . . . Most
people are able to hold most stories they're told in
abeyance, to keep a little distance between the story
and their inmost heart. But . . . for you,
Qing-jao----the terrible lie has become the self-story,
the tale that you must believe if you are to remain
yourself. . . . I know you, Qing-jao, and I expect you
to behave no differently than you do. . . . Few who
are captured by such a powerful story are ever able to
win free of it. (307)
Interestingly, Xenocide uses families, what Louis
Althusser refers to in the title of his essay as
"Ideological State Apparatuses," to transmit such
powerfully perverse stories from one generation to the
next:
"Until a few weeks ago," laments Han Fei-tzu near the
end of the novel,
he had been proudest of all of the fact that he had
accomplished his oath to [his wife] Jiang-qing. This
was not an easy accomplishment, to bring up his
daughter so piously that she never went through a
period of doubt or rebellion against the gods. True,
there were other children just as pious----but their
piety was usually accomplished at the expense of their
education. Han Fei-tzu had let Qing-jao learn
everything, and then had so deftly led her
understanding of it that all fit well with her faith
in the gods.
Now he had reaped his own sowing. He had given her
a worldview that so perfectly preserved her faith that
now, when he had discovered that the gods "voices"
were nothing but the genetic chains with which
Congress had shackled them, nothing could convince
her. (478--79)
In the conclusion he bluntly reveals his heartbreak:
"I wish dogs had torn my tongue out before I taught
you to think that way" (525).
Having tested and apparently proven both Machiavelli's
critique and Gramsci's theory, Xenocide then proceeds
to test a third subversive hypothesis about the nature
of religion: that when people of faith are confronted
with evidence that what they believe is false, they
invariably attempt to preserve their faith by
retreating from reason to emotion. Not surprisingly,
Qing-jao's actions provide an obvious example of just
such a psychological defense mechanism. When she
confronts evidence that her obsessive-compulsive
behavior has been caused by genetic manipulation, she
retreats from her head to her heart:
Qing-jao knew that these were all the lies of a
seducer. For the one thing she could not doubt was the
voice of the gods inside her. Hadn't she felt that
awful need to be purified? Hadn't she felt the joy of
successful worship when her rituals were complete? Her
relationship with the gods was the most certain thing
in her life; and anyone who denied it, who threatened
to take it away from her, had to be not only her
enemy, but the enemy of heaven. (301)
This is a particularly poignant passage, one that
helps make Qing-jao a very sympathetic character. By
the end of the novel, however, what was at first
touching has become tragic, for the most certain part
of Qing-jao's life has proven damnably wrong, and her
quick shift from reason to feeling is revealed as a
false step, a dangerous retreat.
Subversion upon subversion upon subversion----and
Xenocide is not done yet. In its exploration of the
dynamics of hegemony the novel tests a fourth
subversive hypothesis. This time, though, the stakes
are, if not higher, at least broader. The issue is
epistemological and theological, and the question is
whether one can discover truth of any kind, be it
religious or otherwise. The Buggers----an alien species
Ender helped defeat----pose the question in its most
fundamental form. "Maybe we're the fools," they muse,
"for thinking we know things. Maybe humans are the
only ones who can deal with the fact that nothing can
ever be known at all" (317). Qing-jao herself wonders
whether in the final analysis either external evidence
or powerful emotions can be truly reliable guides.
After all, does not what they "mean" ultimately depend
upon the frame of reference from within which they are
interpreted?
What if she was wrong? How could she know anything?
Whether everything Jane said was true or everything
she said was false, the same evidence would lie before
her. Qing-jao would feel exactly as she felt now,
whether it was the gods or some brain disorder causing
the feeling. (304--05)
This is a moment of authentic agony in the novel as
well as one of authentic subversion, a sudden sunburst
aporia (impasse) in which even the trace of truth
becomes untraceable.
Church as a tool of the state, the power of hegemony,
religion as retreat aporia: all are subversive
impulses in Xenocide. All reverberate outside of the
text as well. For what is ultimately at stake in
Xenocide is not the way of Path but rather religion in
general. That is, the issues raised by the novel are
clearly portable issues, as relevant to Card as to
Qing-jao, to Christians as to the godspoken.
Christianity has long been accused of hiding behind
emotion, and discussions of aporia are a commonplace
in contemporary analyses of philosophy and religion.
Certainly, Machiavelli is no stranger to earthbound
debates over the covert relationship between religion
and politics. The most substantial threat to religion
per se, however, is the ease with which Qing-jao turns
contradictory evidence into evidence of divine
providence. What matters here is not just Qing-jao's
way of confirming her faith but the whole process of
reciprocal confirmation itself. If religious hegemony
can become so powerful that it can confirm even
Qing-jao's beliefs, and confirm them in the face of
(and indeed precisely because of) an enormous amount
of evidence to the contrary, then it can potentially
confirm any religious belief; and if it can do that,
if religious hegemony can potentially confirm all
belief, then all reciprocal confirmation is
necessarily suspect. Whatever else readers may think
of Xenocide, they can surely agree on this point: it
produces the subversion half of the
subversion/containment dialectic, and it does so in
spades.
II
But what of containment? Does Xenocide produce that as
well? Is Machiavelli overthrown, religion justified,
free will proven and demonstrated? In part, yes. For
although Qing-jao is never able to depart the way of
Path, others are, including her father and her secret
maid, Si Wang-Mu, a working class foil to Qing-jao and
equal parts sister, double, and replacement. By
counterbalancing Qing-jao with Han Fei-tzu and
Wang-mu, Xenocide makes clear that reciprocal
confirmation sometimes fails and that not all
believers abandon reason at the first sign of trouble.
Nevertheless, this character-driven attempt at
containment is tentative and provisional simply
because in part neither Qing-jao's father nor her
double has anything like Qing-jao's stage presence.
Han Fei-tzu is not nearly as compelling a character as
Qing-jao; nor is Wang-mu, though readers with a
proletarian bent probably wish she were. Further,
although their abandonment of the way of Path
underscores the limits of religious hegemony, both Han
Fei-tzu and Wang-mu become stout defenders of the
Machiavellian view of religion. And although both
characters choose reason over emotion, that choice
leads them to cast off their religion like so much
dead weight. Thus, although Han Fei-tzu and Wang-mu
are interesting foils for Qing-jao, neither does much
to contain the subversion that lies at the heart of
Xenocide. Apparently, apostates are not especially
good defenders of the faith.
For that defense Xenocide brings in the heavy hitters:
Ender Wiggin and Jane, a computer-entity which has
achieved sentience. And in a series of
discussions----those "frequent, irksome, and interminable
theological/philosophical interludes" noted by Kirkus
Reviews----Ender makes a spirited defense of the doctrine
of free will, a doctrine which (if it can be proven
true) is capable of overthrowing Machiavelli and Marx
alike, capable of justifying the belief that truth
does not merely exist but is accessible.
Interestingly, Ender's first attempt at containment
begins in subversion; he initially plays the devil's
advocate, reiterating various ways in which
philosophers explain----and explain away----free will:
"Either we're free or we're not," said Miro. "Either
the story's true or it isn't."
"The point is that we have to believe that it's
true in order to live as civilized human beings," said
Ender.
"No, that's not the point at all," said Miro.
"Because if it's a lie, why should we bother to live
as civilized human beings?"
"Because the species has a better chance to survive
if we do," said Ender. "Because our genes require us
to believe the story in order to enhance our ability
to pass those genes on for many generations in the
future. Because anybody who doesn't believe the story
begins to act in unproductive, uncooperative ways, and
eventually the community, the herd, will reject him
and his opportunities for reproduction will be
diminished----for instance, he'll be put in jail----and the
genes leading to his unbelieving behavior will
eventually be extinguished."
"So the puppeteer requires that we believe that
we're not puppets. We're forced to believe in free
will."
"Or so Valentine explained it to me."
"But she doesn't really believe that, does she?"
"Of course she doesn't. Her genes won't let her."
Ender laughed again. But Miro . . . . was outraged. .
. .
"Calm down," Ender said.
"No," Miro shouted. "My puppeteer is making me
furious!" (385--86)
After a moment of lightheartedness, however, Ender
turns deadly serious by responding to the argument
against free will with a counter-claim of his own. Man
has free will, he asserts, precisely and only because
he has always existed:
I think that we are free, and I don't think it's just
an illusion that we believe in because it has survival
value. And I think we're free because we aren't just
this body, acting out a genetic script. And we aren't
some soul that God created out of nothing. We're free
because we always existed. Right back from the
beginning
of time, only there was no beginning of time so we
existed all along. Nothing ever caused us. We simply
are, and we always were. (386)
Ender's first attempt at containment, then, comes by
way of a grounding assumption which can be neither
proven nor disproven, an assumption which is Mormon
orthodoxy----Card's own faith----par excellence: "The mind
or the intelligence which man possesses," wrote Joseph
Smith, is co-eternal with God himself; "the
intelligence of spirits had no beginning, neither will
it have an end" (353). Ender's second attempt at
containment comes by way of a similarly orthodox
Mormon definition of the nature and purposes of God. A
real god, observes Ender, would have no patience for
hegemonic systems or ways of enforcing obedience. He
would already have all the control he would need or
want. And his work and his glory would be to help, to
teach, to lift, to improve: "So let me tell you,"
Ender declares,
"what I think about gods. I think a real god is not
going to be so scared or angry that he tries to keep
other people down. . . . A real god doesn't care about
control. A real god already has control of everything
that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach
you how to be just like them." (412)
A real god, in short, would not merely allow but also
guarantee the free agency of his subjects. He would be
much like a parent who loves and seeks to persuade but
never forces. As Wang-mu, who has by this point in the
novel become Ender's student, puts it,
What were the gods, then? They would want everyone
else to know and have and be all good things. They
would teach and share and train, but never force.
Like my parents, thought Wang-mu. . . . That was
it. That's what the gods would be . . . . They would
want everyone else to have all that was good in life,
just like good parents. But unlike parents or any
other people, the gods would actually know what was
good and have the power to cause good things to
happen, even when nobody else understood that they
were good. As Wiggin said, real gods . . . would have
all the intelligence and power that it was possible to
have. (432--33)
In essence, then, Ender counters subversion with
orthodoxy (at least Mormon orthodoxy). He acknowledges
the power of various subversive hypotheses about
religion, but he does so without accepting a
corresponding loss of faith. In the process he
contains the subversion that lies at the heart of
Xenocide----but not completely.
Why? Part of the answer is a simple matter of
aesthetic effect. In fiction, showing is almost always
more effective than telling. While subversion in
Xenocide is writ large in its characters' actions,
containment comes chiefly through reflection and
dialogue, the predictable result being that the
novel's subversive elements are felt in a way that its
attempts at containment are not. Ironically, the
unexpected strength of the novel's subversive elements
is due in part, at least, to the fact that Card
appears to have made Qing-jao into what he elsewhere
calls "too memorable" a character. In the first part
of his series on "The Finer Points of
Characterization," Card notes that good fiction
includes a hierarchy of characters----from central to
vanishing----and warns authors against overdoing the
minor ones: "Every character who makes an appearance
can't be just as important as every other. . . . When
you make a [minor] character too memorable, your
audience assumes he will matter more than you intend
him to" (27). Yet that is evidently what happens to
Qing-jao. In his acknowledgments prefacing the text of
Xenocide, Card recalls that
A chance meeting with James Cryer . . . led directly
to the story of Li Qing-jao and Han Fei-tzu at the
heart of this book. Learning that he was a translator
of Chinese poetry, I asked him . . . if he could give
me a few plausible names for some Chinese characters I
was developing. . . . [M]y idea for these characters
was for them to play a fairly minor, though
meaningful, role in the story of Xenocide. But as
James Cryer . . . told me more and more about Li
Qing-jao and Han Fei-tzu . . . I began to realize that
here was the real foundation of the tale I wanted this
book to tell. (ix)
Not surprisingly, then, Qing-jao bears the marks of
this transformation. On the one hand, she has two of
the characteristics that Card typically associates
with minor characters: "The way to make such
characters instantly memorable . . . is to make them
eccentric or obsessive" ("Finer Points" I, 28). But on
the other hand, Qing-jao begins Xenocide as a child in
jeopardy, has a well-documented past, is driven by
unusually complex motives, experiences a full measure
of pain, and is drawn in truly heroic proportions: all
of which, says Card, are the hallmarks of a major
character ("Finer Points II" and "Finer Points III").
"[H]ave characters that are so important and so
believable to the audience that they can't forget
them," declares Card in the third part of his essay on
characterization (36). In Xenocide he does just
that----he creates a character who is simultaneously
unforgettable and uncontainable. Indeed, by the end of
Xenocide, Qing-jao along with the subversion she
embodies has become the focal point of the novel,
while Ender, Wang-mu, Jane, and the containment they
represent have become almost incidental.
However, Qing-jao's stage presence is not the only
threat to containment in the novel. Another more
serious concern is that the very hypotheses Ender's
theology seeks to lock up potentially undermine it.
His assertion of preexisting free will is susceptible
to the counterclaim that such an assertion itself
demonstrates religious hegemony in action, ideology
made flesh, as it were. Certainly, Althusser would
have thought so, for he builds upon Gramsci's notion
of hegemony, paying particular attention to the term
"ideology." Ideology, says Althusser, is more than
just a worldview or system of beliefs. Rather, it is
"a 'Representation' of the Imaginary Relationship of
Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence"
(152). By this Althusser means that although ideology
depicts the conditions under which men live quite
accurately, it depicts their relationship to those
conditions inaccurately. It depicts them as free
subjects rather than in subjection to God, to the
state, to the boss, etc.----and it does so precisely in
order to persuade them to toe the line:
The whole mystery of this effect lies in . . . the
ambiguity of the term subject. In the ordinary use of
the term, subject in fact means (1) a free
subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and
responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being,
who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore
stripped of all freedom except that of freely
accepting his submission. This last note gives us the
meaning of this ambiguity . . . : the individual is
interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he
shall submit freely . . . , i.e. in order that he
shall (freely) accept his subjection . . . . (169)
From Althusser's perspective, then, Ender's assertion
of free will is not an escape from ideology but an
expression of it. The problem, of course, is that both
Ender's and Althusser's statements are mere assertions
with no proof asked or given. Ender asserts that men
are free. Althusser asserts that claims of freedom are
ideologies designed to enforce compliance. Men are
left to choose which perspective they prefer. Or are
they? Unfortunately, no, according to Xenocide. For
although Ender does not prove his assertion of free
will any more than Althusser proves his theory of
ideology, Ender does prove something, by deed if not
word, and that is that Althusser was probably right
all along.
When Ender and Han Fei-tzu conclude that the people of
Path have been manipulated without their consent,
their solution to this violation of choice represents
yet another such violation. They secretly infect the
population with a virus designed to counteract the
effects of the manipulation, doing so in secret
precisely because they realize that if the people of
Path knew what was being done, they would stop it:
they would never willingly consent to be infected by
the virus. Readers know that this is so because when
Han Fei-tzu asks Qing-jao (as a representative of
those who follow the way of Path) for permission to
release the virus, she stoutly refuses, declaring:
"Father, I beg you, don't do this. . . . What can I do
to persuade you? If I say nothing, you will do it, and
when I speak to beg you, you will do it all the more
surely" (526). Further, when the virus becomes
effective, Ender and his co-conspirators conceal both
their secrecy and their violation of the people's
freedom of choice behind a cloak of lies, just as
Congress had before them:
[T]he news reader . . . began reading a report about a
document that was turning up on computers all over the
world. The document said that this plague was a gift
from the gods, freeing the people of Path from a
genetic alteration . . . .
"This document says that the whole world is now
purified. The gods have accepted us." The news
reader's voice trembled as she spoke. . . . [Han
Fei-tzu's] face was radiant. Triumphant.
"Did you see the message that Jane and I
prepared?" he said.
"You!" cried Qing-jao. "My father, a teller of
lies?" (584--85)
Thus, Ender Wiggin, the great voice of freedom in
Xenocide, grants the people of Path no more choice and
no more access to truth than did Congress. His motives
are different, but his covert methods and his
calculated willingness to eliminate choice in the name
of choice are the same, and Ender proves Althusser
right. He subverts his own theology and undoes his own
best attempts at containment. That, Althusser would
surely declare, is the real lesson Xenocide teaches.
An even more serious impediment to containment in
Xenocide, however, has less to do with technique or
ideology than with epistemology. How can men know for
sure, the novel forces us to ask, that what Ender says
is true? How can men know that they are free, that God
is good, and so forth? How can men ever know, if, as
Xenocide makes abundantly clear, the evidence can
always be seen to cut both ways? How, asks Wang-mu,
can men ever figure out such knowledge?
[W]ho was someone like Wang-mu to judge a god? She
couldn't understand their purposes even if they told
her, so how could she ever know that they were good.
Yet the other approach, to trust in them and believe
in them absolutely----wasn't that what Qing-jao was
doing?
No. If there were gods, they would never act as
Qing-jao thought they acted----enslaving people,
tormenting them and humiliating them.
Unless torment and humiliation were good for them
. . .
No! She almost cried aloud, and once again pressed
her face into her hands, this time to keep silence.
(433)
Wang-mu's answer to her own question is illuminating.
She says: "I can only judge by what I understand. . .
. Perhaps I'm so stupid and foolish that I will always
be the enemy to the gods, working against their high
and incomprehensible purposes. But I have to live my
life by what I understand" (434). This is powerful
doctrine. Unfortunately, it is powerful in precisely
the wrong way. Wang-mu is eloquent and persuasive, but
what she says is not a solution but a con- fession: in
this world of flesh and bone there is simply no way to
transcend the subjective, the personal, the
conditional. At this stage, at least, there is simply
no way to know for certain.
Wang-mu's response to the riddle of epistemology,
then, is neither immanent, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari's sense of the word, nor transcendent.
Rather, it is what Michel Foucault calls the will to
knowledge, which is also, Xenocide seems to suggest
(as did Fou-cault), the will to power; for when push
comes to shove, Wang-mu challenges the gods to prove
her wrong neither through reason nor emotion but
through brute force:
And if the gods don't like it, they can poison me
in my sleep or catch me on fire as I'm walking in the
garden tomorrow or just make my arms and legs and head
drop off my body like crumbs off a cake. If they can't
manage to stop a stupid little servant girl like me,
they don't amount to much anyway. (435)
Wang-mu's defiant challenge sounds much like what
Fredric Jame-son says when he, too, finds himself in
an epistemological crunch. The truth of history,
writes Jameson at the most difficult moment in The
Political Unconscious (1981),
can be apprehended only through its effects . . . .
This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as
ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular
theoretical justification: we may be sure that its
alienating necessities will not forget us, however
much we might prefer to ignore them. (102)
Jameson's assertion is of course a retreat rather than
an explanation, a textual symptom of a subtextual
aporia. So is Wang-mu's. They are at once the collapse
of containment and the triumph of power and willful
subjectivity.
Ironically, the novel's failure to contain its own
most subversive elements adequately is probably a
partial result, or at least a clear symptom, of Card's
own extraordinary confidence in the success of his
novelistic enterprise. Only an author who has an
abiding faith in religion is likely to have the
confidence necessary to put it to the screws the way
Card does in Xenocide, with full faith in its ultimate
triumph. In one respect, at least, Card's confidence
is richly rewarded: though Xenocide never fully
contains its own most subversive impulses, in the
smoke and flame of the battle it does become
significant art. None of the other novels in the Ender
Wiggin saga risks nearly as much as does Xenocide, and
none burns so brilliantly in the ensuing struggle
between faith and doubt. In spite of, or perhaps even
because of,
its failure at containment, Xenocide is oddly like
Qing-jao herself: Gloriously Bright.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: NLB, 1971. 123--73.
Anderson, Terry. "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci."
New Left Review 100 (November & January 1976--77):
5--78.
Beowulf. Trans. Charles W. Kennedy. The Literature of
England. Ed. George K. Anderson and William E.
Buckler. 5th ed. 2 Vols. Chicago: Scott Foresman,
1966. Vol. 1:15--65.
Card, Orson Scott. Children of the Mind. New York:
Tor, 1996.
------------. "The Finer Points of Characterization Part I:
Just How Important Are These People?" Writer's Digest
66 (October 1986): 26--28.
------------. "The Finer Points of Characterization Part II:
Creating Characters that Readers Care About." Writer's
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------------. "The Finer Points of Characterization Part III:
Making Your Char-acters Believable." Writer's Digest
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------------. Speaker for the Dead. New York: T. Doherty
Associates, 1986.
------------. Xenocide. New York: Tor, 1992.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is
Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia
UP, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1977.
Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. 1947. Ed. and
trans. Joseph Buttiglegg. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.
Greenblatt, Stephen. "'Invisible Bullets': Renaissance
Authority and Its Subversion." Glyph 8 (1981): 40--61.
Harlot, Thomas. A Brief and True Report of the New
Land of Virginia. London: n. p., 1588.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative
as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
1981.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. New York: Random House,
1961.
Rev. of Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card. Kirkus Reviews
59 (1 June 1991): 699.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. 1608. Ed. Kenneth
Muir. New York: Ran-dom House, 1964.
Smith, Joseph. Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith.
Ed. Joseph Fielding Smith. 15th printing. Salt Lake
City: Deseret, 1965.
[Copyright © Logan Mallory, 2002. Reprinted with permission.]
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