By Sarah Bower
I recently had a conversation with a fellow novelist about heroes and
villains in fiction. I remarked that he had created a memorable, and oddly
loveable, arch-villain, but that the hero of his books was a curiously blank
canvas, an everyman, perhaps, whose distinct and individual characteristics
were elusive and hard to grasp. This conversation set me thinking.
Who do we remember? Who do we love? Heathcliff, wild, violent, brutally
sadistic? Or kind, decent Edgar Linton? Hector, the honourable family man who
goes reluctantly to war, or Achilles, brooding, sulky, riddled with hubris?
Shiny, clean-living Sir Galahad, or Lancelot, whose unruly and selfish heart
brings about the destruction of Camelot? (Not forgetting, of course, that even
before he met Guinevere, he had already abandoned the pregnant Elaine,
Galahad’s mother.) Square-jawed Superman, imbued with mom, apple pie and the
American way, or Batman, whose role as protector of Gotham is born of darkness
in so many ways and who has no means of relating to the rest of humanity other
than disguised as a creature of the night? Ivanhoe and Rowena? Or Brian de
Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca, both of whom played starring roles in my decision to
become a writer. From Milton’s Satan to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert to Bulgakov’s
Master, the bad guys always seem to manage to carry a livelier story than the
good. The Devil, as we know, has all the best tunes.
Everyman, of course, was a deliberate literary device of Bunyan’s and,
I suspect, of my novelist friend with the good line in bad guys, but the
consistency with which literature’s villains arouse our affections, while we
treat the heroes as little more than part of the wallpaper, suggests the
average reader’s moral compass is at the very least going a little haywire
under the influence of bad boy magnetism. And although the theme of this
edition is bad guys, I’m a good feminist, so let’s not forget the girls. I’m
sorry, Mr. Thackeray, but I would far rather be Becky Sharp than Amelia Sedley.
And Scarlett versus Melanie? No contest. Look what Disney recently managed to
do with Maleficent. Who’s really interested in The Sleeping Beauty and her good
godmothers? As Disney recognised in their 2014 movie, it’s the bad fairy who
intrigues, whose story we want to know.
This is because, as consumers of stories, it is the motivation of
characters which most fascinates us and offers catharsis, in that, via the bad
guys, we can rationalise and explain to ourselves our often irrational and
incomprehensible reasons for doing things. Heroic motivations are generally
altruistic. Heroes are driven by their concern for the good of others, not
themselves, or by noble, abstract concepts such as patriotism, religion or
courtly love. Of course, there are dark sides to all these, as we see only too
readily in the current tragedy of the Middle East and North Africa, but those
drawn to the underbelly of heroism are, pretty much by definition, the villains,
at least in the simplistic analysis of popular journalism. And while heroes
claim allegiance to the good, the holy, the self-denying and self-sacrificing,
villains tend to have concrete, comprehensible and personal reasons for their
actions. Heroes may be humane but villains are, perhaps, even if they are Darth
Vadar or Hal, more human.
I’m currently addicted to the Channel 4 drama, Humans, which illustrates this conundrum superbly. For those who
don’t know it, Humans is set in a
parallel present in which very lifelike humanoids undertake most menial jobs on
our behalf. They are the domestic workers, the call centre operatives, street
cleaners and waitresses, the home carers and sex workers. These humanoids
heroically and selflessly (because they obviously have no sense of self) make
the world a more comfortable place for humans. Until, that is, the crazed
megalomaniac scientist who always lurks in such narratives creates a small
group of humanoids which/who do have a sense of self, and emotions, and
intellects, and thus confront the human characters in the drama, as well as its
watchers, with difficult questions about exactly what a human being is. The
crazed scientist is a bad guy, disrupting the status quo. His ‘children’ are
also bad guys, outsiders, a threat to society.
Perhaps this is another way we define bad guys. They are outsiders,
they tend to upset the apple cart. Perhaps, also, this is the source of their
power over the imagination. Bad guys change things. Let me venture briefly into
Christian mythology here. Jesus, I think it’s safe to say, was one of the good
guys, but without the bad guys, Judas, Pilate et al, he would probably be a footnote to the history of the Roman
Empire rather than the founder of a world religion. The concept of heroism is
closely associated with the role of protector – of the poor, the polis, of
women and children and others perceived as too weak to look after themselves.
Protection infers preservation, keeping things the same. Most of us, however much
we protest to the contrary, fear change, find it, at the very least,
uncomfortable. This may help to explain both what makes us portray
change-makers as villains and draws us to them for the way in which they can
enable us to confront our fears safely between the covers of a book or the
confines of a screen. Iago allows us to get to grips with the destructive
powers of jealousy and prejudice. Through Heathcliff we can safely consider the
effects of change on family dynamics. Cocteau’s creepy but exotic enfants terribles draw the sting from
incest by titillating and enchanting us. The blood-soaked works of Edgar Allan
Poe or the cobwebbed ghost stories of M. R. James allow us to peep into the
abyss of hell yet step back safely once the candle is snuffed out and Nanny
says it’s bedtime.
By now, you may well be protesting that many of the fictional
characters I have mentioned here are not what you would call villains. Lancelot
and Batman may have their bad guy moments, but we rarely construe either of
them as villains. Batman is generally listed among superheroes, even though he
has no superpowers. Heathcliff is customarily included in the great trinity of English
literary romantic heroes alongside Messrs. Darcy and Rochester. Yet Rochester
is a cantankerous, lying rogue with a rather spiteful sense of humour, and
Darcy a self-righteous prig. Satan, as portrayed by Milton and subsequently by
Bulgakov and Jagger and Richards, who picked up the ball and ran with it, is
surely one of English literature’s most alluring and attractive figures, and
has been the inspiration for every debonair bad guy since, from Tom Ripley to
Hannibal Lecter to Patrick Bateman. (Although perhaps Bateman doesn’t deserve a
mention here, as a mere fantasist, but being one of my personal favourite bad
guys, he’s getting one.)
The distinction between hero and villain often seems arbitrary, or at
least imposed by a system of morality so simplistic as to have little or no
bearing on the human condition as it is lived and written about by poets and
storytellers. Which brings me back to the matter of motivation. ‘There is
nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,’ says Hamlet, who had to
make an appearance here eventually. All three of my own novels are constructed
around men who can easily be adjudged bad boys. The first features Odo of
Bayeux, younger brother of William the Conqueror and notorious for his
brutality towards the Anglo-Saxons. The second stars Cesare Borgia, whose
reputation needs no further elucidation here. The third bad boy, ironically
named Arthur, is involved in a particularly heinous crime whose details I won’t
go into because it would be a plot spoiler. The book on which I’m currently
working features a Palestinian terrorist. One response my work often elicits is that these central characters aren’t
likeable, they aren’t heroes. Well, no. Where would be the fun in that? It is
the novelist’s job to ask, not just who, how and when but, most crucially of
all, why? Why do her characters act as they do? What is their motivation? What
makes them tick?
The challenge, for me, in writing convincingly about these men was to
find reasons for the character flaws that made them act in wicked ways, to
create back stories which would at least explain, if not justify, their actions.
And once you start doing that, once you start digging behind the violence, the
meanness, the treachery, the vengefulness, the bigotry, whatever it is that
attracts the label ‘bad guy’, the mask of villainy is rapidly stripped away to
reveal a fallible human being, a dysfunctional childhood, a broken heart, a
brutality made, not born, by the vagaries of the lived life. Hamlet drives
Ophelia to suicide because of the pressures of grief and guilt he is under.
Rochester lies to Jane out of shame. Lancelot and Heathcliff are undone by
heartbreak, Maleficent by betrayal. Ripley and Becky Sharp respond to social
humiliation, Norman Bates to the loss of his mother. These factors do not
necessarily justify their behaviour, but they do explain it and locate it in
the realm of the human. Bad guys are real. Whether we like it or not, they’re
like us, flawed, compromised, passionate, irrational and, with everything that
makes us who we are dependent on fragile electrical circuits protected by
nothing but a few millimetres of skin and bone, terrifyingly vulnerable.
I would like to say a big thank you to the bad guys – and girls - and
their creators for taking the hit on our behalf and making us feel safer and
stronger when we close the book or turn off the TV and drag ourselves back to
reality. Life just wouldn’t be the same without them.
Sarah Bower is quite a bad girl,
as one or two bad guys could attest.
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