A Speaker for the Dead, Part I

I expect that the process of dying will be a nuisance. And it might be worse than that. But after I am safely dead, there will be a memorial service and I have a glimmer of what I would like to have happen there [Footnote 1 Ordinarily, I would have said “would like to see happen.”] . I would like a Speaker for the Dead to address the people who have come together to remember my life.

This Speaker for the Dead business is going to require just a little bit of explaining, so I’ll start that right away. First, Speaker for the Dead is a marvelous book by Orson Scott Card. It is one of the series that began with Ender’s Game. Second, the Speaker for the Dead is the name of an office. It is the responsibility of those who hold this office to come when they are called, to find out the truth of the life being remembered, and to tell that truth, whether what he says confirms the opinions of the people who knew him, contradicts their opinions, or expands their opinions into wholly new and unimagined constructs which deny nothing and revalue everything.

Finally, in this book, the Speaker for the Dead is Andrew Wiggin. He is an ordinary person, rather than a demigod or demidevil, as some have said, but he has had an extraordinary life (He is Ender, in Ender’s Game and committed xenocide) and he has the worlds’ best computer implanted in his ear. [Footnote 2 Please note the placement of that apostrophe; I am very proud of it.] Wiggin comes to the Lusitania Colony on the planet Baía to “speak” the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira.

It is this “speaking my death” that so attracts me. Here is Card’s account of what the idea meant to him when he first thought of it.

“How did the Speaker for the Dead come to be? As with all my stories, this one began with more than one idea. The concept of a “speaker for the dead” arose from my experiences with death and funerals. I have written of this at greater length elsewhere; suffice it to say that I grew dissatisfied with the way the we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life [Footnote 3 Learning what “the actual life” was is the first job of the Speaker. Saying what it was is the final job. My appetite for “the truth,” although it is lofty, is not that lofty. I am after a new story of my life; one that integrates the things people already know into a larger story, a fuller telling of the pattern of which my friends already know the pieces. It is just a little awkward to call this “my story,” because it is my belief that there is a story so grand and so encompassing that I call it THE story, and with reference to that story, I want only to be a character who appears in it somewhere. In that story, I would be happy to be the guy who shows up in Michael for the sole purpose of missing his train and who is never seen again.] that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived.I had the privilege of giving the eulogy at both my parents’ memorial services. It was called “a eulogy,” but it was eu- = good in the sense that it affirmed their lives and led us all toward a broader appreciation of them. It wasn’t eu- in the sense of proclaiming the nice things and hiding the harder ones.]

I rejected that idea. I thought that a more appropriate funeral would be to say, honestly, what that person was and what that person did. But to me, “honesty” doesn’t simply mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of saying all the nice ones. It doesn’t even consist in averaging them out. No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story—what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story that we can never know, the story that we never can know—and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only story truly worth telling.”

That’s Card’s view. My view is a little more modest. I don’t believe in “the real story” as something we can know so no speaker, even a Speaker for the Dead, could tell us. And, there is no one to serve as a Speaker for the Dead. At the same time, I think Card is worth listening to. It is a paltry use of time to gather together to say good things about a person’s life, while everyone there knows that “the truth” is much larger, much more varied, much more interesting, and—in the absence of the new narrative I am hoping for—that life is much more mysterious as well. Now that would be worth doing.

We can see the effects of such a Speaker in Speaker for the Dead. It has taken me a little effort to pull out of comments made about the life of Marcos Maria Ribeira some “kinds of comments.” It is the kind of comment I’m after, not the specific comments, because my life has not been at all like Ribeira’s. Similarly, it will take you some effort to grasp the responses of the people who have gathered to hear the speaker because the value they have are as “kinds of responses,” not as actual responses. Let’s play with that pattern just a little.

Ribeira was accused of beating up on his wife. He did. It puzzled people that he never beat up on his children. The Speaker points out that Marcos had no children; his wife had children. Obviously, someone else was the father. He had had since puberty a disease that made him sterile. Here is the response of the Colony’s doctor:

Dr. Navio was puzzled…then he realized what he should have known before, that Marcos was not the rare exception to the pattern of the disease. There were no exceptions. Navio’s face reddened.

What happened here? Dr. Navio knew Marcos had a disease that should have rendered him sterile. He knew there had never been an exception to this effect of the disease. When Marcos’s wife began having children, Dr. Navio decided that Marcos must be an exception. Now, with the Speaker standing before them all and telling the story, Dr. Navio realizes that he did know the truth about Marcos and that he suppressed it. He must have thought that if he failed to realize it, everyone else would also fail. Now that the Speaker has put the truth before everyone, Navio must face his own failure and his own embarrassment.

Then there is Miro, who has just learned in hearing the Speaker that he, himself, is a bastard. All of his life suddenly appears as false; the love of his life turns out to be his sister; the work of his life is overturned. Here is his response.

Miro clung to the sound of [the Speaker’s] voice, trying to hate it, yet failing, because he knew, could not deceive himself, he knew that [the Speaker] was a destroyer, but what he destroyed was an illusion and the illusion had to die. The truth about [the indigenous species of the planet], the truth about ourselves. Somehow, this ancient man is able to see the truth and it doesn’t blind his eyes or drive him mad. I must listen to his voice and let its power come to me, so I, too, can stare at the light and not die.

Bishop Peregrino objects, on a number of grounds to what the Speaker is doing, telling Marcos’s story in public. The bishop would have preferred to hear it in the confessional. Yet Peregrino felt the power of it. Here is the way Card represents the bishop.

“Yet Peregrino had felt the power of it, the way the whole community was forced to discover these people that they thought they knew, and then discover them again, and then again; and each revision of the story forced them all to reconceive themselves as well for they had been part of this story, too, had been touched by it; all the people a hundred, a thousand times, never understanding until now who it was they touched."

By my time of life, I have been at a lot of funerals already and unless I die pretty soon myself, I will attend many more. I have tried, twice, to serve the function of the Speaker for the Dead. [Footnote 4 I had the privilege of giving the eulogy at both my parents’ memorial services. It was called “a eulogy,” but it was eu- = good in the sense that it affirmed their lives and led us all toward a broader appreciation of them. It wasn’t eu- in the sense of proclaiming the nice things and hiding the harder ones.] I gave it my best shot, but I didn’t know enough to really do it right and also may not have had the courage. I did try, though, and in trying, I got a sense of what it would take to do it well and of how wonderful it would be—what a gift to us all—if it really were done well.

Consider the effects described among the members of the Colony who heard the Speaker. Dr. Navio had to recognize that really, he had always known about Marcos’s illness. That means he should have understood something about the children of Marcos’s wife. But he didn’t and now he is ashamed of himself. Miro hears shattering things from the Speaker, but he can see that the Speaker is not shattered by them and takes from that the hope that he, too, can learn to look at the light and not be blinded by it. Peregrino has the broadest view. He sees his own congregants learning the meaning of their own lives; their complicity in a community tragedy; their blindness to what could have been plain to them had they been willing to see it.

These three responses—excuse me, these three “kinds of responses”— are truly wonderful. They are good for everyone. They begin a reconstitution of a broken and distant community. But they seem to require a nearly omniscient Speaker for the Dead and I am quite sure that such people are in short supply. So what does that mean for my own hopes? At my own memorial service, I am going to have to get along without a Speaker for the Dead. But I still aspire to the goals Card had in mind. They still sound really good to me.

How close could I get to that, do you think, if I got to work on it now? Whose help would I have to ask? Would people be willing to help if they took seriously the value of Card’s sense of what sort of an opportunity a memorial service is?