Sarah Stone | May/Summer 2013

NOTES

Our contemporary aesthetic generally trains writers toward empathy, away from moral judgment; toward an immaculate surface of vivid detail, away from abstraction and interpretation; toward fairness to all characters, away from taking sides, in either personal or political matters. And hooray for empathy, fairness, vivid detail, but what about when we really do wish to interpret, and even take sides, whether personal or political? Our lives are full of fascinating and enraging power discrepancies, and yet it’s difficult for fiction to show the moment when the armed and unarmed meet: there’s a strong temptation to give way to frothing indignation against the villains or bathetic pity for the victims. Writers who frequently tackle politics—whether on a grand scale or in terms of the effects of world events on individual lives—often find that all of our early work and most of our drafts suffer from a mix of such indignation and pity.

Still, fiction and poetry need not take the Chekhovian stance of the objective observer: structural conflicts, mythic resonances, and formal juxtapositions can create wild narratives, both intimate and grand. Chekhov wrote, famously, in  one of his letters:

In my opinion it is not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc.; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness…Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is … to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language. To [a critic], the artist who is a psychologist must figure things out because otherwise, why is he a psychologist? But I don’t agree with him. It’s about time that everyone who writes—especially genuine literary artists—admit that in this world you can’t figure anything out.¹

In another letter, he wrote:

Your statement that the world is “teeming with villains and villainesses” is true. Human nature is imperfect, so it would be odd to perceive none but the righteous. Requiring literature to dig up a “pearl” from the pack of villains is tantamount to negating literature altogether.²

Chekhov acknowledged the existence of the villainous and regarded the examination of some of the uglier aspects of life as a writer’s duty. He often created excruciatingly narcissistic or damaging characters, observed with a sharp compassion, but he tended to create them in groups, as “a pack of villains.” In The Duel, for example, or Uncle Vanya, the majority of the characters behave so badly that you have sympathy for everyone, or no one, or empathy for their sufferings combined with exasperation at their uncontrolled and self-centered acting out. They certainly don’t exult in their “villainy,” if they’re even aware of it. Very few of them set out to deliberately injure or take power over others.

In Uncle Vanya, the professor has enslaved his family to his vision and his physical sufferings, but in his self-absorption—maybe in part the self-absorption that often comes with constant pain—he doesn’t even realize this. And Vanya has, out of the very human desire to have a leader one can believe in, surrendered his time, energy, and money to serving the professor for years. His self-delusions make him complicit, so that when he wakes up to his situation and begins firing his gun, he is as furious at himself as at the professor. The audience, therefore, is not allowed to perceive him as a victim. Each of the characters, except the fairly saintly Sonya, gets to act badly. We see why they do, and so we can’t judge them as worse villains than we are ourselves. It’s all about the extenuating circumstances—physical pain or the sense of a wasted life—though Chekhov’s ruthless compassion doesn’t condone their excesses. And he doesn’t really take sides. Part of Chekhov’s craft is this structural balancing of bad behavior so that our sympathies switch from moment to moment. We learn from him how to avoid the appearance of special pleading for a character.

Some writers begin with a love for language or image, but many writers begin with the indignation or pity that comes from a fierce moral outrage against the abuses of power, perhaps from our childhood wounds or perhaps just from watching the workings of the world. When we first try to write the stories and poetry that express this sense of outrage or dislocation between what we feel the world is meant to be and what it actually is, we tend to write works in which a central character is badly treated by villainous parents or older siblings or a cruel lover, in which the inhabitants of a powerless country are colonized and abused by imperialist oppressors, or in which a bully terrorizes the weaker members of a social group.

Workshop teaches us to create more sophisticated conflicts, in which, for example, opponents or protagonists of more-or-less equal strength each want something reasonable but incompatible. It’s a good, useful, and rich model for conflict, and I’m not trying to throw it out or set up a binary here, just to reopen the question of a different kind of structural conflict; one in which any reasonable person would take one side rather than the other. This is not about authorial stance—whether the author is taking the side of a character—but about works that examine what it means to use power unjustly, and what effects those uses of power have on individual lives. We sometimes abandon these subjects too easily when we’re told our work is one-sided or didactic, when, in reality, the difficulty is primarily a craft problem: we’re trying to represent the uneven power dynamic too directly, through head-on collisions in which the weaker side must, of course, lose. Not much narrative tension in that, and so it begins to feel to the reader that the work is not engaged in telling a story but presenting a list of grievances.

Three great works show us ways around this trap: a novel-in-verse in which a put-upon central character is badly treated by his villainous family, a play in which imperialist colonizers cause both psychological destruction and death, and a novel in which a malicious figure manipulates the weaker members of a family/social group. Each of the works transcends any question of simple pity or outrage, though rage and pathos are part of the mix. All three use unsettling formal juxtapositions of language, tone, and/or subject matter, and draw on mythical echoes to create complicated experiences that neither attempt to be even-handed nor settle for simple depictions of victims and villains.

In Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: a Novel in Verse, Geryon, a red, winged monster-child, replicates his relationship with his sexually abusive older brother by falling for an emotionally unavailable lover. This book, like much of Carson’s work, combines raw psychological/emotional urgency with philosophical inquiry. Some fragments of a poem about Geryon by the 6^th century B.C. poet Stesichoros survive. In Greek mythology, Geryon, a monster, was the object of Herakles’s tenth labor: Herakles killed him and captured his herd of red cattle. Carson has improvised freely on the myth: Autobiography of Red moves about in time and place—mixing contemporary and classical, legendary and mundane. Her book includes a preface, a translation/rewrite of Stesichoros’s fragments, three appendices before the book, and a final “interview” with Stesichoros himself. She mixes tragic and comic elements with a poker-faced pseudo-scholarship—the first preface begins: “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”³

In Carson’s reconfiguration of the tale, Geryon adores his mother, fears his older brother, makes his way through the strange world of kindergarten, suffers a soul-crushing love affair with Herakles, travels to Hades to visit Herakles’s grandmother and later to Argentina in search of philosophy and an identity he can claim, becomes involved in a love triangle with Herakles and his new lover, and finally claims his lineage by flying up over a live volcano. Or almost finally, since the last sections of the book are a decided return to earth, complete with heartburn and the disorienting final “interview” with Stesichoros. Geryon knows that he’ll die—he seems to know, from childhood, the end of the tale—and that creates a context for everything that happens to him.

Early on, when the child Geryon is moved into his brother’s room, he notices his brother “pulling on his stick as he did most nights before sleep.” When he asks about it, his brother teases him roughly, bullies him, and bribes him with a cat’s-eye marble, and “so they developed an economy of sex for cat’s eyes.” Geryon thinks that this makes his brother happy—his brother orders him not to tell their mother, as “Voyaging into the rotten ruby of the night became a contest of freedom and bad logic.”⁴ When Geryon begins to refuse, his brother threatens to tell their mother how nobody likes Geryon in school, and Geryon gives way. The passage that follows shows the apparent good-fellowship of Geryon’s brother, as well as the mixture of pain, surrender, and companionship that Geryon will come to associate with love, and that will pave the way for his violent love for Herakles later on.

…After it was over his brother’s voice
got very kind.
You’re nice Geryon I’ll take you swimming tomorrow okay?
Geryon would climb back up to his bunk,
recover his pajama bottoms and lie on his back. He lay very straight
in the fantastic temperatures
of the red pulse as it sank away and he thought about
   the difference between outside and inside.
Inside is mine, he thought. The next day Geryon and his brother
went to the beach.
They swam and practiced belching and ate jam-and-sand
   sandwiches on a blanket.
Geryon’s brother found an American dollar bill
and gave it to Geryon. Geryon found a piece of an old war
   helmet and hid it.
That was also the day
he began his autobiography. In this work Geryon set down all
   inside things
particularly his own heroism
and early death much to the despair of the community. He
   coolly omitted
all outside things.⁵

The brother here serves as a villain not because he’s taking pleasure in harming Geryon, but because he’s oblivious. Some kinds of self-involvement—like the professor in Uncle Vanya, keeping the family awake all night because he’s in pain—seem understandable. The more villainous self-involvement, like that of Geryon’s brother, or the narrator in Tom McCarthy’s brilliant Remainder, is that self-involvement which sets no limits to the harm it will do. Such villains either don’t notice, or don’t care about, the destruction they create around them. Geryon’s brother seems to feel that some recompense is required—a trip to the beach with jam-and-sand sandwiches, a found dollar bill—but the smallness of the brotherly bribes give a sense of just how little he understands the costs to Geryon.

Carson also makes Geryon a resourceful sufferer, even though he seems to be unable to resist or to ask for help. The authorial voice, at least, has a sense of humor or perspective about how Geryon pictures his own “heroism/and early death much to the despair of the community,” though it’s a layered and painful humor, since in the myth he does, in fact, die young. The fact that we’re all the heroes, rather than the monsters, of our own tales is part of the subtext.

The passage also works because of the proportion of expression of suffering or emotion to details of the world. Geryon does not lie awake raging at his brother, but instead decides on a sphere of self-determination. He cannot control his outer circumstances, so he develops an interior life in the form of an autobiography, which will be many things over the course of the book. Not words but objects, beginning with a torn up ten-dollar bill from his mother’s purse glued to the top of a tomato and eventually progressing to photographs. Geryon’s attention to the world outside himself, his using that world to tell his own story, is inherently a sympathetic choice.

The poem’s structure and metaphors do much of the work of conveying the emotion. The alternating long and short lines of the poem, which vary enough to be not entirely predictable, capture what it is to be a slightly off-balance protagonist in an off-balance world. Then too, Carson uses a beautiful, strange metaphor for the pain Geryon feels after his brother’s invasions: “He lay very straight / in the fantastic temperatures / of the red pulse as it sank away and he thought about the difference between outside and inside.” That’s all we need—we don’t need a page or six of revenge fantasies, self-pity, or detailed description of his physical or emotional pain. One very strong metaphor—or some other device that both captures and deflects attention—does the work and then allows the poem to move on. The cheerful outrageousness of the belching contest and jam-and-sand sandwiches, the little gifts juxtaposed with the abuse, also does far more work than staying with the pain, because it allows the reader to feel an outrage or anxiety that has no outlet. If the emotions a character feels are the obvious ones, it’s a mistake to dwell on them. And the attempt to directly capture the sensations of physical pain or pleasure without metaphor is almost always doomed.

Sometimes the book does focus on Geryon’s heartbreak after the breakup with Herakles, in lines like the following:

His brain was jerking forward like a bad slide projector. He
   saw the doorway
the house the night the world and
on the other side of the world somewhere Herakles laughing
   drinking getting
into a car and Geryon’s
whole body formed one arch of a cry—upcast to that custom,
   the human custom
of wrong love.⁶

Even here, in one of the most direct statements in the book, Carson uses metaphor to engage readers’ minds as well as emotions. First it’s the brain “jerking forward like a bad slide projector”—one unavoidable image replayed after another. We know that any kind of trauma can produce this repetition, though it’s left to us to make the connection between the brother’s abuse and the trauma of lost love. Then we have another metaphor: his body “formed one arch of a cry”—a visual image we have to stop to work out, immediately followed by “upcast to that custom,” a phrase dislocating in vocabulary and syntax, making demands that both reveal Geryon’s predicament and that keep us slightly apart from it as we work out what’s happening.

We could spend time on considering the relationship with Herakles, but it might not be illuminating about power abuses, because the situation is not Herakles’s fault. He’s self-centered and focused on his own pleasure, unable to return Geryon’s wild love, but he’s not villainous, and the most painful thing he says is that they’ll always be friends and, later, that he wants Geryon to be free. The narrative does take Geryon’s side, but it’s as much against the force of “wrong love” and of his own emotions, as against the problematic older brother and then the lover. This is what allows the novel to avoid the sense that it was somehow designed to express a desire for revenge against emotional or sexual cruelty. Geryon, writing his autobiography from the time he’s five till the time he’s forty-four, knows from early on that it’s up to him to battle through this emotional state that’s like a potentially deadly illness. His mixture of resourcefulness and self-pity makes him a very human monster.

A long imaginative work—poetry or fiction or novel in verse—thrives on juxtaposition. The tiles in a mosaic may be beautiful, but they become something more in relation to each other; whatever meanings they acquire—moral or aesthetic—when they are assembled, arise from the ways that the colors and images refract off each other. Carson creates context for, and distance from, the fierceness of the love story and the family pain through a jumble of other elements: Geryon wrestling with the nature of consciousness in his encounter with a strange philosopher, visits to Herakles’s grandmother in Hades and the volcano in South America, and the attempt to make an autobiography out of the materials of the world. Carson uses shifts not only in subject matter, place, and time, but also in language—from the colloquial to the figurative to the abstract—to disrupt linearity, setting out the pieces of the book like mosaic tiles.

In Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, the power struggles have consequences not only for individuals and nations but also in a transcendent spirit realm. This play, based on an actual event in 1944 and an earlier play (Oba Waja The King is Dead by Duro Ladipo), depicts a failure that destroys hope and meaning in a culture already damaged by colonialism. A month after the death of the King, the King’s Horseman, Elesin Oba, must find the right moment—based on the passage of the moon, to release his own life by an act of will: not a conventional suicide but a deliberate entrance into the other world to prepare the way for the king, his horse, and his dog. Elesin, a sensualist beloved of the market women, sees a beautiful girl on what should be his last day of life, and receives the grudging consent of the leader of the market women, Iyaloja, to marry her before he dies. Both Iyaloja and Elesin’s friend, the Praise-Singer (who serves as conscience and chorus), warn Elesin about tying himself to this world, but he’s too confident to listen. Meanwhile, the British step in, in the person of Pilkings, a colonial officer at odds with Elesin because Pilkings and his wife Jane have sent Elesin’s son Olunde to Great Britain to be trained as a doctor. Pilkings, getting wind of Elesin’s intention to die, intervenes. As Elesin, in his weakness, hesitates, the “Native Administration” policemen break in and seize him. Olunde, returning from England ready to mourn his father, instead chooses to die in his place, throwing the world out of its natural order. Iyaloja and the market women bring his body to Elesin’s prison, and Elesin strangles himself with his chains, dying too late and to no purpose.

The tragedy juxtaposes the two cultures—Yoruban and British—through enactments of their beliefs, through their relationships to duty and death, and also through their music and dance and costume: the vivid and playful storytelling songs of the Praise-Singer and Elesin and the market women versus a colonial costume ball, to be visited by the Prince of Wales and the Royal Party, at which Pilkings and Jane blithely wear egungun masks and costumes, confiscated from an ancestral ritual. Pilkings and Jane aren’t evil, though Pilkings is brutal about what he sees as local superstition, and very sure of the rightness of his interventions. Soyinka uses the actions and words of the British characters, along with Olunde’s scathing analysis of the British at home and abroad, to depict the colonialists as ignorant and self-righteous, but not inhuman or beyond acquiring a glimmer of understanding here or there. Jane, as the most aware of the British characters, keeps them from serving as straw men. She calls out her husband when he insults the “Native Administration” policeman or their housekeeper, she tries to get Olunde to explain Yoruban ways to her, and she tries to communicate with Elesin towards the end of the play, though he rebuffs her for not knowing her place as a wife who should stay out of men’s business. (There’s a subtext in the play of power between men and women: the power of the market women and the subject position of the wives.)

In the play, we feel the effects of an imperial power invading another country, convinced that it’s acting in the interests of the local people, in order to bring them a more advanced and successful way of life. Soyinka, though, doesn’t make his play only about the conflict between two cultures. He writes, in his introduction to the Norton critical edition:

One of the more obvious alternative structures of the play would be to make the District Officer the victim of a cruel dilemma. This is not to my taste and it is not by chance that I have avoided dialogue or situation which would encourage this. No attempt should be made in production to suggest it. The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely. The confrontation in the play is largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind—the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passage which links all: transition.⁷

Elesin, a tragic protagonist, gives way to weakness and pride despite warnings. In the following passage, the Praise-Singer warns him of the danger of his intention to marry just as he should be preparing to leave the world. Through the rhythms of the language, the images, and the sense of history, Soyinka conveys a piercing sense of the poetic truths of their lives:

PRAISE-SINGER: They love to spoil you but beware. The hands of women also weaken the unwary.

ELESIN: This night I’ll lay my head upon their lap and go to sleep. This night I’ll touch feet with their feet in a dance that is no longer of this earth. But the smell of their flesh, their sweat, the smell of indigo on their cloth, this is the last air I wish to breathe as I go to meet my great forebears.

PRAISE-SINGER: In their time the world was never tilted from its groove, it shall not be in yours.

ELESIN: The gods have said No.

PRAISE-SINGER: In their time the great wars came and went, the little wars came and went; the white slavers came and went, they took away the heart of our race, they bore away the mind and muscle of our race. The city fell and was rebuilt; the city fell and our people trudged through mountain and forest to found a new home, but—Elesin Oba, do you hear me?

ELESIN: I hear your voice Olohun-iyo.

PRAISE-SINGER: Our world was never wrenched from its true course.

ELESIN: The gods have said No.⁸

The poetry and song of the early portion of the play, full of mischief and pleasure, give way to laments as the action unfolds. Elesin tries to excuse himself, to put all of the blame on the British, after his failure. He says to Pilkings, who’s standing guard outside the basement cell where he is imprisoned:

ELESIN:... You are waiting for dawn white man. I hear you saying to yourself: only so many hours until dawn and then the danger is over. All I must do is to keep him alive tonight. You don’t quite understand it all but you know that tonight is when what ought to be must be brought about. I shall ease your mind even more, ghostly one. It is not an entire night but a moment of the night, and that moment is past. The moon was my messenger and guide. When it reached a certain gateway in the sky, it touched that moment for which my whole life has been spent in blessings. Even I do not know the gateway. I have stood here and scanned the sky for a glimpse of that door but, I cannot see it. Human eyes are useless for a search of this nature. But in the house of osugbo, those who keep watch through the spirit recognize the moment, they sent word to me through the voice of our sacred drums to prepare myself. I heard them and I shed all thoughts of earth. I began to follow the moon to the abode of the gods... servant of the white king, that was when you entered my chosen place of departure on feet of desecration.

PILKINGS: I’m sorry, but we all see our duty differently.⁹

In a play, of course, everything has to happen through the dialogue and action. The contrast of the two voices here says everything about the richness of one, and the stiff lack of understanding of the other, and about the limits of both characters’ self-awareness. When the Praise-Singer and Iyaloja and her market women come to jail carrying the wrapped body of Olunde’s corpse, they excoriate Elesin. He, at least, should have known better and he has failed them all:

IYALOJA [moves forward and removes the covering]: Your courier Elesin, cast your eyes on the favoured companion of the King.
[Rolled up in the mat, his head and feet showing at either end, is the body of OLUNDE.]
There lies the honour of your household and of our race. Because he could not bear to let honour fly out of doors, he stopped it with his life. The son has proved the father, Elesin, and there’s nothing left in your mouth to gnash but infant gums.

PRAISE-SINGER: Elesin, we placed the reins of the world in your hands yet you watched it plunge over the edge of the bitter precipice. You sat with folded arms while evil strangers tilted the world from its course and crashed it beyond the edge of emptiness—you muttered, there is little that one man can do, you left us floundering in a blind future. Your heir has taken the burden on himself. What the end will be, we are not gods to tell. But this young shoot has poured its sap into the parent stalk and we know this is not the way of life. Our world is tumbling in the void of strangers, Elesin.¹⁰

By the time Elesin has strangled himself and his young wife has closed his eyelids at Iyaloja’s command, by the time the market women and the Praise-Singer file out, we feel the weight of the loss of not only these characters but of an irreplaceable way of life. The villainy is structural, not personal, but it’s the human weaknesses that allow it to have its full, dire effect.

Both Autobiography of Red and Death and the King’s Horseman make dramatic and narrative use of a villainy that arises from a refusal to see the other; of individuals or cultures who refuse to admit the costs of their actions. Geryon’s brother doesn’t seem to see what he takes from Geryon as crucial, Herakles is just a thoughtless physical being, and the British have talked themselves into the idea that they’re bringing civilization to the colonies. There’s a difference of degree as well as scale, however, in these two works: Geryon never protests or fights back against his brother, whereas the Yorubans resist, and are overcome by greater force. Unlike Geryon’s brother, the British are aware that they’re acting against the will of the Yorubans.

In Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honorable Defeat, we take a further step into villainy, the deliberate villainy that Doris Lessing refers to in The Golden Notebook as “joy in malice.” In Lessing’s novel, Anna, the protagonist, describes in one of her journals a dream of a powerful, androgynous old man, or woman, given life by malice. I’m quoting here a few lines from several memorable pages:

The figure, or object, for it was not human, more like a species of elf or pixie, danced and jumped with a jerky cocky liveliness and it menaced not only me, but everything that was alive, but impersonally, and without reason... and the creature was always powerful, with an inner vitality which I knew was caused by a purposeless, undirected, causeless spite. It mocked and jibed and hurt, wished murder, wished death. And yet it was always vibrant with joy.¹¹

In A Fairly Honorable Defeat, a trickster figure sets out to take apart a group of family and friends and lovers, apparently out of an amoral restlessness and curiosity. Lessing’s description of her dream figure comes to mind to describe the energy displayed by Julius, a brilliant researcher who, in this 1970 novel, has recently given up his biological warfare research for the military, described as—“Nerve gas. And a kind of anthrax which resists antibiotics.”¹² He’s now returning from the U.S. to England, a mythic figure, a fallen angel, a promising scholar who has been acting as an agent of destruction.

Other characters in the novel include his old friend, Rupert—a philosopher writing an endlessly in-progress book on the nature of Good; Rupert’s too-giving wife Hilda; Hilda’s mind-bogglingly narcissistic sister Morgan who’s also Julius’s ex-lover who has just returned to England and is intent on getting Julius back; Morgan’s not-quite-ex-husband Tallis, muddled, saintly, exasperating; Rupert’s younger brother Simon—the most appealing character in the book, and maybe one of the most appealing characters in all of English literature; Simon’s partner, Axel, much older and disapproving of his own love for Simon; Rupert and Hilda’s disaffected adolescent son, Peter, living with Tallis; and Tallis’s aging father, Leonard.

Julius exploits their various weaknesses in ways that result in the breaking or near-breaking of several relationships, the destruction of a life’s work, and even one death. (By drowning, of course, because it’s Iris Murdoch, but horrifying and affecting even though you know, the minute you see the lovely new swimming pool in the opening chapter, that one of them will wind up in it. The question, of course, is who will drown and why. Iris Murdoch was sublimely unafraid of repeating herself or borrowing material, which is part of what let her be so remarkably productive.)

Julius really is a deliberate and forthright villain. When we first see him, it’s through the eyes of Simon, who fears him and his effect on the partnership:

Simon was feeling nervous. He sometimes wondered if other people’s minds were as hard for them to control as his was for him. It was not easy to find out such things. It was no use giving himself instructions and upbraiding himself for being irrational. Immense flights of fantasy were taking place. During the last few days he had lost Axel in any of a dozen different ways, all somehow connected with Julius. Simon tried hard to be generous in his thoughts. That at least he could usually manage. His temperament helped him to turn all conceivable blame onto himself. He did not seriously imagine that Julius would deliberately try to steal Axel. As far as he knew Julius had no interests of that sort at all. He did not imagine that Julius would deliberately make any sort of trouble for him. He simply feared that the proximity of this very intelligent and high-powered old friend would open Axel’s eyes. Axel would suddenly see how flimsy Simon was, how unsophisticated, how lacking in cleverness and wit, how hopelessly ignorant about important things such as Mozart and truth functions and the balance of payments.¹³

This passage gives a sense of Simon’s character—including both his self-awareness and his self-deprecation, acknowledges that Julius is dangerous, and provides narrative tension: Simon, in attempting to argue himself out of his intuitive knowledge and to think the best of Julius, is clearly putting himself at risk. Because of his fear, Simon observes Julius very closely:

Julius was plumper than Simon remembered him as being, but the plumpness suited him. He looked older and more benign. There had been a tigerish look, but that was gone. His curiously colourless hair, not exactly fair, seemed like a pale wig upon a dark man. The hair was fairly curly and fairly short, bringing into prominence the big long rather heavy face, bronzed by the sun and now a little flushed perhaps by argument. He had drunk very little wine. The eyes, of a dark colour hard to determine, a sort of purplish brown perhaps, were rimmed by heavy lids and much inclined to twinkle. At this moment, between two radiant candle flames, they appeared to be violet, but that must be an illusion. The nose was very slightly hooked and the mouth, which imparted a certain sweetness and sadness to the expression, long and very finely shaped. It was a face that was not noticeably Jewish except perhaps in a watchful heaviness about the eyes. Julius spoke with a faint Central European accent and a faint stammer.¹⁴

This passage complicates Julius. He looks benign, though we already know he’s nothing of the kind, and also sweet, sad, and watchful, with a heaviness that implies grief or damage. His sun-bronzing suggests sensuality and an outdoor life, a little surprising for someone we’ve only heard about as a high-powered intellectual who’s been working for the military developing chemical weapons. At the same time, he has self-control: he hasn’t drunk much wine. His flushing, or arousal, comes not from the pleasures of the flesh but from argument, from conflict. His being Jewish turns out to be crucial, though we don’t know this till much later.

Julius’s outrageousness consists partly in the actions he stages: sowing suspicion between Axel and Simon, inducing a hysterical imaginary love affair between Rupert and his sister-in-law Morgan and then letting Hilda know about it, locking Morgan naked in his apartment with no access to clothes or food, and so on.

He also tells the truth in such a way as to make it appear to be a generous lie. His effrontery is jaw-dropping. The entanglement between Rupert and Morgan comes about from a Shakespearean subplot of forged and re-addressed love letters that he’s set up for the pleasure of seeing what disruption he can cause, a situation straight out of Much Ado About Nothing, but with infinitely more malign results.

As Julius leads Hilda to “discover” the affair—which consists entirely of a lot of explanations of feelings and a hug or so—and to believe it to be far more advanced than it is, he says:

“But truly, Hilda, there’s nothing there, or practically nothing—shadow, a fancy. Be generous. Don’t speak of it to poor Rupert. Let those two deal with it themselves. Why, they may have done so already. In a long happy marriage there must be moments when one turns a blind eye. Be merciful to them and let it all be buried and forgotten. It’s something very tiny and very momentary. And you must know poor Morgan is in a thoroughly unstable condition.”
“I must think,” said Hilda. “I must think.”
“I wish I could undo the effect of my words. There is really nothing between Morgan and Rupert. It would honestly be more true to say that than to say anything else at all.”¹⁵

Julius manages to find levers to open the moral cracks in most of the other characters in the novel. We never get his POV, and no one is able to interpret or analyze his motives. He is recklessly amoral, just as the saintly Tallis is enragingly muddled, living helplessly in filth and working for almost no money among the poor of the East End, overly generous in all kinds of ways to Morgan and everyone else around him. This specific embodiment of good and evil in the Luciferian, charming, and focused Julius and the saintly, exasperating, and rather bewildered Tallis gives a focus to the philosophical ideas about the nature of good that the characters wrangle over. Juxtaposition again: Murdoch sets the abstract ideas against their dramatic realization. The characters never specifically enact the philosophical discussions, but complicate them in interesting ways.

It’s only very late in the book, after watching Julius bring more than one marriage to the brink of destruction and be instrumental in the death of one of the central characters, that Tallis is the one to notice the blue numbers on Julius’s forearm. Nothing is made of this; we are left to bring our own knowledge of history, of life in concentration camps, of some of the possible psychological effects of that life, more Tadeusz Borowski than Primo Levi. We remember that Julius is Jewish, and perhaps—at least subliminally—the “watchful heaviness around his eyes.” This knowledge doesn’t excuse anything, but it opens a window into what kinds of damage Julius may have sustained. Murdoch’s choice to do this at the end, rather than the beginning, of the book means that Julius must keep our attention based on his own merits, rather than because of his backstory.

The danger with a malicious character is that readers will say, “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t see right through him,” or “Why are all these people so entranced?” In a movie or a play, the physical presence and magnetism of the actors counter their actions and make that engagement plausible. On the page, though, writers have to find ways of creating charismatic villains that give readers a visceral understanding of their appeal for other characters. Julius is, despite everything, fascinating in his vibrant energy and brilliance—that “joy in malice”—and almost appealing in his ability to see the truth about people in his circle, despite his moral warping. In a book full of fascinating multi-page examinations of the characters’ attempts to think through their situations, in which we watch them tangle themselves up in rationalizations and misconceptions born of their fears or selfishness, Julius is ruthlessly clear-sighted. He can see everyone’s weaknesses, and he apparently can’t let them alone, or bear them. The only one he seems to respect, or be willing to help, is Tallis—Julius sees through the muddle to the saint beneath.

A really villainous character has to offer something not only to the other characters, but also to the reader, and what Julius offers us is clarity and surprising actions or observations. He serves, in terms of his insight about the others, as the readers’ stand-in, or sometimes perhaps the author’s; it’s discombobulating to have the antagonist as stand-in. In a conversation with Rupert (who’s endlessly writing a book about morality)—a brief moment from a four and a half page argument—Julius sets out his theories of good and evil, sensible at one moment, and then twisted in the next.

“As for evil being dreary, that’s an old story too. Have you ever noticed how naturally small children accept the doctrine of the Trinity, which is after all one of the most peculiar of all human conceptual inventions? Grown men show an equal facility for making completely absurd metaphysical assumptions which they feel instinctively to be comforting—for instance the assumption that good is bright and meaningful and evil is shabby, dreary or at least dark. In fact experience entirely contradicts this assumption. Good is dull. What novelist ever succeeded in making a good man interesting? It is characteristic of this planet that the path of virtue is so unutterably depressing that it can be guaranteed to break the spirit and quench the vision of anybody who consistently attempts to tread it. Evil, on the contrary, is exciting and fascinating and alive. It is also very much more mysterious than good. Good can be seen through. Evil is opaque.”
“I would like to say exactly the opposite –” began Rupert.
“That is because you fancy something to be present which in fact is not present at all except as a shadowy dream. What passes for human goodness is in reality a tiny phenomenon, messy, limited, truncated, and as I say dull. Whereas evil (only I would prefer some less emotive name for it) reaches far far away into the depths of the human spirit and is connected with the deepest springs of human vitality.”¹⁶

Murdoch lets the characters lecture each other, but she never allows anyone to be entirely right, and she leaves space for us to disagree with all of them. In this way, she refrains from lecturing the readers and instead uses the ideas and the plot to let us see the dangers of clarity without compassion. She’s a moralist, but not a moralizer, and her characters are primarily victims of their own lies, self-deceptions, or self-interest. Julius is the agent or catalyst who tests their weaknesses: some characters get lost in their own lies and self-deceptions and self-destruct, while those who finally face reality and tell the truth survive. The other characters aren’t fighting Julius, even when they think they are, but their own natures.

These three works don’t get their dramatic tension from the depiction of a villain crushing a victim. Instead, the tension arises from the situation created by the villainy or injustice. It’s as if the characters were trying to survive a blizzard. All of the protagonists have agency—even though a character like Julius may call them puppets and play with their strings. Within the situations of these works, the characters still have choices, and it’s through their mistaken choices and particular weaknesses that they help to bring about their own downfalls.

Even though part of the project in each of these works is to show the nature and consequences of the misuse of power, the authorial voice or intelligence actually functions as Chekhov’s “impartial witness.” Apparently, though I set out to recklessly disagree with Chekhov, it turns out I’m acknowledging that he’s right, as usual. (Which just goes to show something I think that every writer already knows, which is that Chekhov may well be the ultimate omniscient narrator.) Nonetheless, these works—unlike most of Chekhov’s stories and plays—definitely take sides via the action and sometimes through the choice of language or thoughts of the characters. The conflict is embedded in the structure; if one side gets its way, the other is defeated: Geryon and his brother (or Herakles), the British District Officer and the Nigerian King’s Horseman, Julius and his circle. This kind of structural conflict can be either in addition to, or instead of, the “conflict” or disagreement expressed in dialogue. The particular nature of the power imbalances in these works requires a nuanced portrayal to complicate and deepen their clear moral distinctions.

In this world, we may not be able to figure anything out, but I would say that we all have moral compasses, however flawed or even occasionally broken, and acting as an impartial witness isn’t a question of trying to be fair to all sides when a character, or set of characters, is clearly problematic. When one side holds all the power, the narrative possibilities come from showing the choices individual people will make under these hard conditions, and the comic and tragic consequences of those choices.                                 

Sarah Stone (www.sarah-stone.com) is the author of the novel The True Sources of the Nile and also co-author (with Ron Nyren) of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. She teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, where this essay began as a lecture.

Notes

1. Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov’s Life & Thought: Selected Letters & Commentary. Michel Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky, trans., selection, introduction, & commentary by Simon Karlinsky, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 104.
2. Ibid., 62.
3. Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (NewYork: Knopf, 1998), 3.
4. Ibid., 27-28.
5. Ibid., 28-29.
6. Ibid., 75.
7. Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Simon Gikandi (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 3.
8. Ibid., 6.
9. Ibid., 51.
10. Ibid., 62.
11. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook (New York: Bantam, 1962), 477-478.
12. Murdoch, Iris. A Fairly Honorable Defeat, intro by Peter J. Reed (New York, Penguin, 2001), 4.
13. Ibid., 66.
14. Ibid., 68.
15. Ibid., 296.
16. Ibid., 204.