a grand unified theory of villainy

Some years ago I heard a piece of writing advice which I thought was very bad, but which I nonetheless think about all the time. The advice, from an American fantasy novelist, was this: when you’re writing a fantasy novel, you should only have a single major villain. And your villain can’t be “society.” You need a solid, unitary nemesis.

Now, there’s something valid in this about having focused, specific bad guys in a genre novel, but I also detect a strong whiff of CIA Thought. I don’t think this novelist said “society” by accident. The villain can’t be “society” because society isn’t allowed to be the thing that’s really bad in American fiction, even in very imaginative American fiction. Most of the time, the villain(s) in any kind of American novel can only act in opposition to society, institutions, systems, justice, the law, which we all know to be good, at worst only temporarily perverted, just needing tweaks, never built on the backs of historical crimes, never in need of structural change. (Yes, this was a white novelist, and she said “the villain can’t be Society” several years after the debut of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series; I know, I knowww).

What’s interesting about this writer’s advice in the context of fantasy novels—besides the immediate temporal fact of Jemisin’s triple-Hugo winning novels, in which the villain is quite arguably society, and there isn’t one ultimate bad guy—is that even if you wanted to embody Society in the form of an evil dark lord bent on conquest, you can extremely do that. Refracting or anthropomorphizing abstract concepts through a single image is exactly what fantasy does well, and what it’s done well from the beginning.

This has also annoyed critics, right from the beginning. Edmund Wilson’s 1956 pan of Lord of the Rings titled “Oo, Those Awful Orcs!” makes the complaint that, along with the orcs being insufficiently awful, Sauron is too distant and too abstract: we never get to “meet” him as a character. This isn’t really accurate—Sauron’s mind and voice appear several times through the medium of the palantir and the putting-of the Ring; and his personality, motives, and likely decisions are discussed at great length by Gandalf, who knows him well. But it’s true that you never meet Sauron the way you normally meet a character in a literary novel. You don’t see him, or have tea with him, or hear his backstory. It’s not that kind of book and he isn’t that kind of symbol. Wilson seems to have been waiting for something he wasn’t going to get, and he isn’t terribly clear in the review regarding what he thinks it ought to have been. Some mystery, some power, some three-dimensional truth about evil that he believes great literature is supposed to provide.

The problem of representing evil as a character in three literary dimensions is that evil doesn’t really exist like that. I don’t mean this solely in the abstract sense: I mean that real evil, human evil, is usually boring, to the point of Hannah Arendt’s phrase having already entered the realm of cliche. But it’s still true and she’s still right. Evil is banal; malice is flat. The cycle of abuse isn’t just a hideous thing to be trapped within; there’s also a dullness to the rhythm of it, a predictability to its unpredictable violence. We tend to valorize bad guys as interesting, both in media and in real life: even this valorization and the stories about bad guys take place in a kind of procedural rhythm. And we usually don’t mean bad guys, as in villains, but usually anti-heroes or otherwise violent men. Either way we’re mainly excited about fighting and explosions, which are indeed exciting, and most of that’s choreography.

I thought about villainy a lot when I was working on Dangerous Fictions, specifically the chapter about CIA fiction, which has turned out to be the most popular chapter in the book. In brief, the CIA made no attempt to suppress or alter the direction of genre fiction—despite that fantasy novelist parroting their line anyway—but a cadre of state and private institutions did attempt to influence literary fiction through MFA programs during the Cold War. At one point in the CIA chapter, I zero in on a strange comment that Mark McGurl makes in The Program Era, his history of American M.F.A programs. McGurl is aware that program fiction was supposed to promote a hey-can’t-we-all-just-get-along evenhandedness against stark Soviet realism with its good proletarians and evil fatcats; he’s loosely in favor of this, unlike the more cynical (and better) Eric Bennett in Workshops of Empire. But McGurl runs into some trouble with the bad guys in these novels; and into even more trouble with actual American literary novelists. When it comes to Toni Morrison, for example, he can only explain away her depiction of the “schoolteacher” character in Beloved—a gutter racist and would-be intellectual who abuses slaves—as a kind of “allegorical” figure, “a token not of the complexity of human motives, but of an abstract set of values tending toward pure evil.”

I take great exception to this in Dangerous Fictions, and go on at some length about it, because I think McGurl totally misreads Morrison on this point, and he sets her briefly outside the canon of contemporary literary fiction when she’s well within it. Morrison didn’t write a flat character but a complex one; “schoolteacher” is a great villain, a realistic villain, a chilling villain, a boring villain. When “schoolteacher” is called out by another white authority figure he gets embarrassed, and spits; he’s not the classy intellectual that he thinks he is. He doesn’t get a name other than “schoolteacher” because literally all these guys are like that. If he’s an allegorical or symbolic figure it’s only because he’s reductive; he has reduced himself.

Evil characters don’t necessarily have to be boring like this; many classic villains are quite interesting. But they’re usually interesting for reasons other than their wickedness. When you get close to them, they might be revealed to be in a state of profound tension, or grief, or acting out against Society (who was in fact the real villain all along—dun dun dun!!!!) And this can be quite interesting—this is how you get your Magnetos. These states of profound tension can also be irreconcilable: this is how you get your Javerts. When Valjean saves Inspector Javert’s life, offering him a vision of a new society, a better one, a world based on genuine decency and real Christian virtue, Javert can’t tolerate it, and it destroys him. That’s great stuff. It’s worth a thousand explosions.

Javert is rendered sympathetically, but Victor Hugo never tries to apologize for him or excuse him, as you might see with a defense attorney or a beaten spouse. He gets like this, you see, because of his upbringing. Hugo does offer us a tragic backstory for the good Inspector, but keeps us at a nice remove; Javert isn’t a guy whose history excuses what he’s become, or justifies the harshness and weirdness of his current existence. I talked about this in an earlier post, but I think the big mistake a lot of writers are making lately is to center Trauma as the real villain. This becomes uncomfortable in a classic hero/villain story (as most of these are) since it suggests that the tension within these villains—as damaged people who can’t reconcile with their trauma—can only be resolved through their deaths.

The trauma-as-real-villain narrative also usually results in some kind of triumphant summation that actually—since both hero and villain have tragic backstories, i.e. Harry Potter and Voldemort—all that really matters is agency and the decisions we make regarding our tragic pasts. Which is fine, but it still renders evil, childishly (and whatever, Harry Potter is a children’s series) as a kind of failure to launch, a failure to grow up, rather than as anything related to active personal cruelty. The Death Eaters may be jerks, but Voldemort isn’t, exactly. He’s scared of death and doesn’t want to die; many of our current real-life villains are scared of death and don’t want to die. But the real-life kind don’t always have tragic backstories, and whether they do or not, it doesn’t explain their actions. They’re actively choosing to immiserate as many people as possible because they seem to like it, and/or because they don’t seem to understand that other human beings are real. Of course, fantasy novels don’t need to be real-real in the sense of providing a one-to-one Borgesian map of reality, but if they’re consistently failing to embody the actual psychic patterns of the actual people running our civilization and wrecking everything good and beautiful about it, it’s worth asking why, and why writers have been discouraged from doing so.

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You know who wrote a good villain? Stephen King. Whether you’ve read all of his novels, or only a few, you’re probably encountered Flagg in one form or another. Flagg is the man in black who fled across the desert as the gunslinger followed. Flagg is the wicked sorcerer. Flagg is the active malice. Flagg pops up across many of Stephen King’s novels, and his reappearances lend him a sense of mythic grandeur. But also: this fucking guy, again??? Evil, human evil, is so often the same fucking guy, appearing over and over. If you’ve met one incel, you’ve pretty much met them all. They’re the same weenies who claim they were bullied but who probably did most of the bullying, or at least dreamed of being the bullies. Incels accuse other people of being NPCs out of simple projection; they know how alike and easily codeable they are. They’re much more like each other than the sincerely heroic and self-sacrificing, who are different every time.

There’s a story going around about how Elon Musk was bullied as a kid, and had to be hospitalized; or rather, the real story is that he insulted another boy whose father committed suicide, and the boy pushed Elon down a flight of stairs. We know about this story because Elon’s father reminisced about it, unsympathetically, to the press. Obviously the apple doesn’t fall far from the abusive tree; obviously lots of people have endured shitty childhoods and not cut off live-saving aid to desperate children in foreign countries. It’s very easy to look at someone like Musk and try to invent some kind of grand narrative of villainy, to look at his wealth and power and retrofit a kind of satanic grandeur. He gets like this, you see, because of his upbringing. But he doesn’t deserve that, and he hasn’t earned it. He’s not really that interesting.

Even Satan himself isn’t all that grand, or that interesting. Paradise Lost and Milton’s subsumed revolutionary fervor doesn’t change the fact that Satan is a little bitch, jealous of inferior mortals. He remains a little bitch in his successful fantasy incarnations. Morgoth in the Silmarillion is a whiner who’s just mad he was passed over for the big job and (reading between the lines) the girl too. He spends his time getting tons of people killed and forcing the family of a man who disrespected him into a weird sex game. I don’t think Edmund Wilson would have liked Morgoth either, but oh well. Not everybody knows a proper villain when they see one.¹

1. No footnotes? No footnotes??? I’M SORRY. I’ll do better next time.