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Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Good Slate piece on the problem with the way the "pull the tube" crowd has approached the Schiavo case.
The whole thing is starting to sound like a great topic for a bizarre litcrit piece. A hundred years ago, I wrote a (not very good) paper on the power of powerlessness, exploring how major characters in Beckett's Endgame and Marie Redonnet's Tir et Lir used their helplessness and the guilt it evoked in others in order to control the people around them. But there was one point I only now realize I might have but didn't explore: the need of a voice to invoke such powers. For strangely, the too common storyline in the Schiavo case is about how Michael Schiavo is powerless to live his own new life with the living specter of Terri in the background. Unable to speak, Terri's powerlessness, though far greater, is sidelined, turned as much into Michael's problem as it is her own.
The person writing the article is living with a degenerative disease that she knows may leave her, too, unable to speak one day. By twist and turn of fate, any of us might find ourselves in such a place. Out of the world of litcrit and in a real world where such things aren't metaphors but facts of life, we would do well to find surer voices for those unable to speak. For we, ourselves, may one day be the ones being spoken for.
posted by gbarto at 11:37 PM
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