Todorov and Orson Scott Card

In reading Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America, I could not help but be shocked by the similarities between it and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. Since I can’t come up with a brilliant thesis to tie these all together, I’m just going to go through Todorov’s book and point out its similarities with Ender’s Game and Speaker.

“Columbus’s behavior implies that he does not grant the Indians the right to have their own will, that he judges them, in short, as living objects” (Todorov, 48). Todorov also notes Columbus’s “failure to recognize the Indians, and the refusal to admit them as a subject having the same rights as oneself, but different” (Todorov, 49). In comparing these descriptions to Card, the first one corresponds to varelse and the second one is remarkably similar to the definition of otherlander. Columbus judges the Indians as living objects, grouping them with animals which Demosthenes groups under varelse. What Columbus refuses to do is recognize the Indians as otherlander, defined as “the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country” (Card, 34). Instead, he believes them to be equivalent to animals, or varelse.

Todorov, in discussing the Indians’ style of communication (communication with the world), talks of “the collectivity” in which “society as a whole…decides the fate of the individual” (Todorov, 67). He says that “death is a catastrophe only from the narrowly individual perspective, whereas, from the social point of view, the benefit derived from submission to group rule counts for more than the loss of an individual” (68). His discussions of human sacrifice and the collectivity deciding the fate of the individual strongly reminds me of the Buggers’ society. Because the Buggers have one mind, the mind of the Hive Queen, they act as one unit, or a collectivity. As Ender comes to realize, individual lives are meaningless as compared to the good of society as a whole. Furthermore, just as the Spaniards only practice interhuman communication, the humans in Ender’s Game communication solely among themselves. They too, like the Spaniards, are unable to comprehend the concept of communication with the world.

Todorov says that the Aztec warriors derogatively referred to the Spaniards as women in order to criticize their fighting abilities. He states that “the “women” would win this war, if only figuratively” (Todorov, 92) because what was needed was “the feminine side of culture: improvisation rather than ritual, words rather than weapons” (Todorov, 92). In Ender’s Game, Ender is compared to his two siblings, his sister Valentine and his brother Peter.

Card constructs his character as a combination of his siblings’ personalities. Not only does he have the ruthlessness of Peter, but he also has the compassion and empathy of his sister. The Aztecs believe that the use of weapons is relegated to men and the use of words is relegated to women. Men destroy, while women communication. Ender has both of these qualities, which makes him an ideal commander of the human invasion. Note also that Ender, unlike any of the other commanders at Battle School, recognizes the need for improvisation. He organizes his army into five toons, allowing for each commander and sub-commander, actually every soldier, to be able to respond to changing circumstances. It is the army’s proficiency at improvisation that allows them to defeat all other armies.

Another instance of a similarity with the Buggers’ style of communication is Todorov’s statement “Where the language is above all a means of designating the group speaking it and expressing the coherence proper to that group, it is not necessary to impose it on the other” (Todorov, 123). The Buggers, during the three wars, do not communicate with the humans. It is not necessary for them to do so because their communication acts simply to express their coherence. Though it has use for them and their ability to operate, there is no need to use it to communicate with the humans, until the very end where they communicate with Ender. Until that point, however (which at any rate occurs after the war is over), there is no need to impose the Buggers form of communication on the humans.

Finally, Todorov, in speaking of Cortés ability to understand the Indians, says “destruction becomes possible precisely because of this understanding” (Todorov, 127). His notion of “understanding-that-kills” (Todorov, 127) is remarkably similar to that of Card’s in Ender’s Game. Because of his understanding of the Buggers, Ender is able to destroy them. It is his empathy, his ability to understand the other, that allows him to effectively exterminate them.