Terminating the Drama

Speaking as a writer, I must say that sometimes the pro-choice vocabulary is obviously the wrong one to use, even if you're a pro-choicer. The April 17th issue of The New Yorker has a profile of Maurice Sendak, author most famously of Where the Wild Things Are and one of those few artists whose style is instantly recognized by tens of millions. He is a culturally significant figure who also had a rather interesting life.

The profile, by Cynthia Zarin, includes this passage about Sendak's father Philip and his mother Sarah:

He told Maurice that before he was born Sarah had stood on a bench; Philip had repeatedly pushed her off, in an effort to terminate the pregnancy. "I would listen in fascination," Sendak recalls. "To him, it was a funny story."

Notice what the story is about: Sendak's parents' attempt to kill him before he was born. The whole point of Sendak's telling the writer and the writer's telling his readers, is that the poor man's parents tried to kill him before he was born. That, to put it clearly, there might not have been a Sendak to profile. All those books never written, all the pleasure they've given never enjoyed.

It is an intensely personal story. It is a story that depends for its effect upon it's being clearly about a person, not a thing. If it is not a personal story, it is not a story worth telling. Any competent writer will know this and will do everything he can to make the reader see the person whose life was once so threatened when he was most vulnerable. (Let me note that the usage may be the editor's, not the writer's, and may be the magazine's house style.)

This writer has already spent a couple of thousand words introducing this person to you, and knows (as you've read this far in the article) that you care about him, at least a little. She knows you have a picture of him in your mind. She knows you'll react to the idea that his parents tried to kill him. She's got the drama handed to her on a plate. It's the journalist's equivalent of the climax of an action movie when the hero is about to die.

So what does she do? She (or her editor) tells us that these two people were trying (only and merely) "to terminate the pregnancy." Not kill their unborn child, the future writer and artist Maurice Sendak, who is so good at what he does and has given such pleasure to so many that The New Yorker decided to profile him. Just "terminate the pregnancy."

To use the p.c. term, the writer gives away the chance to make a dramatic point of the kind a good profile offers its readers. This is a failure in, and perhaps a sin against, the writer's craft.

Comments

[Joe Long]

Ah, but she accidentally makes a different point - every time PC euphemisms are used THAT way, their "euphemizing" power is undermined, as the reader's mind (consciously or not) translates "terminate the pregnancy" into "kill the baby" so that the story makes sense again.

[Christohper]

Remember the modernist/materialist does not recognize the reality of person and falls back to the materialistic "mind". When this mind is a phenomenon of chemical activity of the brain along with socialization, then Sendak does not have existence until sometime after birth. If he did not exist, then the fetus in the womb is only related to his existence by accident. Thus he and his father can sit back and discuss, think, and have emotions (i.e. laughing) about this event as if it is disconnected to who he is because to them it truly is. It is not a sin to the writers craft(to them) because in their reality Sendak is not truly related to the fetus in the womb...

[Judy Warner]

David Mills, if only every writer cared as much about language as you do, and saw how important language is to meaning, what a better world this would be.

[David Mills]

Thank you Joe and Christopher for insightful comments and thank you Judy for a very kind comment (gorsh, as Pluto would say).

In response to Christopher's insight into the materialist mind, I should make clear that in context Sendak was not laughing with his father. His "fascination" was that of someone looking at something horrifying, as a mouse are said to be fascinated by a snake. That's what made the writer or editor's use of the p.c. term even more striking: Sendak clearly knew that it was he himself his father tried to kill.

[GL]

Ah, euphemisms. I listen to Issues, Etc. from KFUO in St. Louis (a LCMS radio station). On the April 4, 2006 show, the host interviewed a man from "Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures," which, as you might guess, supports the use of embryonic stem cells for medical research. After that interview, the interviewer took calls. One of the callers insisted on distinguishing between embryos and pre-embryos, the later being fertilized eggs which have not yet implanted. Indeed, in researching efforts to force pharmacists to fill prescriptions for "emergency contraception," one repeatedly reads "experts" who insist that emergency contraceptives do not end a pregnancy since a pregnancy has not occured until implantation. Cold comfort to the individual human being whose already existing life was ended. Makes all the difference in the world that I was killed before implantation -- that's alright.

At least in the New Yorker article, maybe a few perceptive persons will see that "terminat[ing] the pregnancy," in the case of Sendak, would have meant killing a real individual human being and begin to think that this is always the case when a mother "terminate[s] the pregnancy." Let's hope that a few of those, as a result that story, will recognize the same is true when medical research is performed using "pre-embryos" or when an "emergency contraceptive" prevents the implantation of an already fertilized egg.

[Beth]

A note of encouragement, David -- my freshmen read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in preparation for their final exam next week, and when I opened discussion in class yesterday, there was an immediate chorus of "Oh, that was *so* convicting; I'm really glad I read it before I finished the essay [due yesterday also] so I could try to make it a little better!"

So there are some 19-year-olds out there that actually care about language and are trying to learn to use it well. (You can imagine it made my semester better than usual!)