By Anonymous
UCR Class of 2015
As some of you might have heard, there has been a heated debate about whether the film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game”, which will be hitting the cinemas soon, should be boycotted. The debate arose because the author himself has made several homophobic statements and even wrote in his “Experiment of Fictional Thinking” that Obama is encouraging a militia of unemployed men to establish an autocracy.
The question that I ask myself is: Should one boycott both the book and the movie adaptation because of the author’s controversial statements? Lets have a look at some other writers with slightly questionable beliefs; for example, Fyodor Dostoevsky, a Russian writer of the 19th century, was known to be an Anti-Semite – he was also a gambling addict and alcoholic. The Italian writer and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio aligned himself with the fascists in the early 1920s, and while science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft was simply racist, philosopher Martin Heidegger – deemed to be one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century – was a card-carrying Nazi.
So why do we keep on reading and loving the works of writers whose personal beliefs we find so abhorrent? Coming back to the example of Orson Scott-Card, people opposing the boycott claim that even though the writer might have made anti-homosexuality statements, there is nothing of that sort to be found in the book (and therefore nothing similar will appear in the upcoming film), which can be seen as the primary justification to keep on reading the rest of our talented but politically misguided extremists as well. D’Annunzio’s books and poems did not propagate Fascism in any way, they were rather escapist; and neither does Dostoevsky denounce any religious or ethnic group in his works (even though he did go on an occasional rant about Western Europeans).
There seems to be some broad agreement, whether explicit or implicit, that a writer’s output is readable if it doesn’t express the weird, controversial things the author believes or does in his or her leisure.
Anita Bielicka, class of 2015, is a Politics and Law major from Bremen, Germany.
