Evil in fiction
October 13, 2003 | 12:00am
An interesting situation came up in my writing class a couple of Fridays ago. A student submitted a story – or rather, the beginning of one – that had to do with a girl who was being abused by her stepfather. This led to a discussion of how writers should best deal with evil and wrongdoing in their stories.
While it isn’t one of my own preoccupations, I know that the subject lies close to many a Filipino heart, given how we’ve been trained in school to read literature for its moral content. (Remember being asked, at the end of a long read, "So, class, what’s the moral lesson?") Like many others, I have serious questions about this approach to the teaching of literature (which should also engage the student in the enjoyment of words and meanings for their own sake).
But at the same time I’ll grant that if literature didn’t deal in some way with the clarification of good and bad and right and wrong (again, no matter how blurred these terms may be – and maybe because of that), then it can’t be all that useful to our lives. Literature at best instructs as it delights, and part of that instruction has to do with the way it shows us, through concrete albeit fictionalized situations, why we are the way we are – especially when we veer radically off course.
How can a nice and talented young man be driven to suicide? (See Willa Cather’s "Paul’s Case.") Where does a Bible salesman find the motive to steal a cripple’s wooden leg? (Bizarre? Read Flannery O’Connor’s "Good Country People.") What leads an entire town, including its children, to stone a woman to death? (Check out Shirley Jackson’s "The Lottery," as well as the even more disturbing "Going to Meet the Man" by James Baldwin.)
Of course, if there’s one thing that modern literature teaches, it’s that things aren’t as black and white as they might have seemed once. Time was when good and evil battled quite starkly in drama and fiction (and even poetry – witness Milton’s Paradise Lost), with little question about who was who. The "good moral character" that standard job applications still require us to prove can trace its origins to Aristotle’s concept of character as an expression of moral purpose; only later did character mean style instead of substance. The morality plays of the 14th to 16th centuries in England pitted characters with self-explanatory names like Virtue against, what else, Vice, or one of the Seven Deadly Sins like Pride, Sloth, and Envy. (And here’s your word for the day – "aptronym," a name that fits the nature or character of an individual.) For a while, that was entertaining and edifying enough – Good was good and Evil was evil – even if someone like John Milton pushed the envelope and made Lucifer just a tad too sympathetic for the comfort of contemporary critics, depicting him as a complex, anti-establishment rebel in a way that modern readers would easily identify with.
Today, with some help from psychology, we understand that a little of both God and Satan resides in us. (And to all you fine fundamentalists rushing to your keyboards to disabuse me of my misimpressions, I say "Forbear!") We have it in us to do wondrous good or grievous harm, depending on the confluence of circumstances and on our own moral and psychological constitution at that point. This is what we like about modern heroes (whom we can hardly tell apart from modern villains) – like the new Batman, they have shades and shadows in their character; they brood, they mope, they agonize in the garden before doing the right thing, which is never easy and cost-free.
Even and especially on the level of nations and national leaders, the old safe suppositions about "good and bad" and "right and wrong" – I’m talking Allies vs. Nazis and the Axis in World War II – have long crumbled, replaced by deep and often well-founded suspicions about greed and the lust for power animating national and personal designs. (That’s hardly news.)
Now, how did we get here? Oh, yes, my student. I advised the class that it wasn’t enough to show evil the way we often see it (in stereotypes, with a livid scar on one cheek and a tic in the other). As abhorrent as it may sound, the fiction writer’s job is to make evil look fresh – yes, new, interesting, and even attractive and intelligent. Only this way can it become a worthy contender for our affections and provoke a real moral crisis, a true test of faith and character. An adversary who’s a pushover doesn’t really make a case for the power of what’s good or right.
This is also why, apropos of last week’s piece on "Media and Madness," I make a point of asking my writing students why they must use mentally unstable or downright insane people as their main characters in their stories. Not, of course, that you can’t – Lord knows how many Palanca prizewinning plays have a baliw in center stage, almost as an obligatory element. And there’s your explanation – crazy characters just seem and sound more interesting; they can do and say anything (especially words of wisdom – a precocity they usually share with four-year-olds) without the author having to explain why. But there, likewise, lies the problem for the fictionist: Just as it would in the law, madness absolves the character of any moral responsibility, because your character has no real understanding of the choices he or she faces, and of their consequences. And without moral responsibility, there’s no real conflict.
True evil (I’m using the term here to apply to the fictional adversary) knows exactly what it wants and what it’s doing. It has a mind, it plans, it executes, it responds creatively to changing situations. And sometimes we can’t see it for what it is. It isn’t even necessarily a tangible person, but rather a presence, an invasive yet also a seductive force.
And so, to do right by goodness, we have to do right by evil as well, and present it as freshly and as carefully as we might construct a hero’s character, lavishing detail upon detail, nuance upon nuance. It has to be memorable; it has to be deliberate; at best (or at worst), it has to have been given a fair chance to repudiate or redeem itself – failing or refusing which it will now fight goodness to the death.
The day evil becomes generic or forgettable is the day it wins, because we will cease to recognize it and to care. The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt’s oft-quoted phrase "the banality of evil" comes to mind, although there has been much lively debate about what exactly Arendt meant by it.
What I know (or think I know; philosophers have a way of tripping you up) is that it’s no longer enough for the fiction writer to show what a rotten, unjust, and dangerous world we live in – we knew that, already, just by watching the TV news. We have to provide more novel insights into the complexities of the moral maze or minefield we daily tread.
That said, I don’t think it’s for fiction (at least short realist fiction) to solve the problems it poses and turn the world into a better place ("for you and for me and the entire human race," as Michael Jackson might have suggested). Oppressed characters can begin to comprehend their situation and even resolve to fight back; even oppressors can reach some point of self-awareness and ponder issues of responsibility and redemption. But you can’t turn the universe around in 10 or 15 pages; that’s what novels are for – they have the wingspan for the kind of sweep or lift the battered spirit needs, once in a while.
And maybe, in this long-winded way, I’ve just answered another of my pet questions ("Why don’t we have more happy stories?") – bad things can happen very quickly, while good things often take time and space and heroic effort to materialize.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
While it isn’t one of my own preoccupations, I know that the subject lies close to many a Filipino heart, given how we’ve been trained in school to read literature for its moral content. (Remember being asked, at the end of a long read, "So, class, what’s the moral lesson?") Like many others, I have serious questions about this approach to the teaching of literature (which should also engage the student in the enjoyment of words and meanings for their own sake).
But at the same time I’ll grant that if literature didn’t deal in some way with the clarification of good and bad and right and wrong (again, no matter how blurred these terms may be – and maybe because of that), then it can’t be all that useful to our lives. Literature at best instructs as it delights, and part of that instruction has to do with the way it shows us, through concrete albeit fictionalized situations, why we are the way we are – especially when we veer radically off course.
How can a nice and talented young man be driven to suicide? (See Willa Cather’s "Paul’s Case.") Where does a Bible salesman find the motive to steal a cripple’s wooden leg? (Bizarre? Read Flannery O’Connor’s "Good Country People.") What leads an entire town, including its children, to stone a woman to death? (Check out Shirley Jackson’s "The Lottery," as well as the even more disturbing "Going to Meet the Man" by James Baldwin.)
Of course, if there’s one thing that modern literature teaches, it’s that things aren’t as black and white as they might have seemed once. Time was when good and evil battled quite starkly in drama and fiction (and even poetry – witness Milton’s Paradise Lost), with little question about who was who. The "good moral character" that standard job applications still require us to prove can trace its origins to Aristotle’s concept of character as an expression of moral purpose; only later did character mean style instead of substance. The morality plays of the 14th to 16th centuries in England pitted characters with self-explanatory names like Virtue against, what else, Vice, or one of the Seven Deadly Sins like Pride, Sloth, and Envy. (And here’s your word for the day – "aptronym," a name that fits the nature or character of an individual.) For a while, that was entertaining and edifying enough – Good was good and Evil was evil – even if someone like John Milton pushed the envelope and made Lucifer just a tad too sympathetic for the comfort of contemporary critics, depicting him as a complex, anti-establishment rebel in a way that modern readers would easily identify with.
Today, with some help from psychology, we understand that a little of both God and Satan resides in us. (And to all you fine fundamentalists rushing to your keyboards to disabuse me of my misimpressions, I say "Forbear!") We have it in us to do wondrous good or grievous harm, depending on the confluence of circumstances and on our own moral and psychological constitution at that point. This is what we like about modern heroes (whom we can hardly tell apart from modern villains) – like the new Batman, they have shades and shadows in their character; they brood, they mope, they agonize in the garden before doing the right thing, which is never easy and cost-free.
Even and especially on the level of nations and national leaders, the old safe suppositions about "good and bad" and "right and wrong" – I’m talking Allies vs. Nazis and the Axis in World War II – have long crumbled, replaced by deep and often well-founded suspicions about greed and the lust for power animating national and personal designs. (That’s hardly news.)
Now, how did we get here? Oh, yes, my student. I advised the class that it wasn’t enough to show evil the way we often see it (in stereotypes, with a livid scar on one cheek and a tic in the other). As abhorrent as it may sound, the fiction writer’s job is to make evil look fresh – yes, new, interesting, and even attractive and intelligent. Only this way can it become a worthy contender for our affections and provoke a real moral crisis, a true test of faith and character. An adversary who’s a pushover doesn’t really make a case for the power of what’s good or right.
This is also why, apropos of last week’s piece on "Media and Madness," I make a point of asking my writing students why they must use mentally unstable or downright insane people as their main characters in their stories. Not, of course, that you can’t – Lord knows how many Palanca prizewinning plays have a baliw in center stage, almost as an obligatory element. And there’s your explanation – crazy characters just seem and sound more interesting; they can do and say anything (especially words of wisdom – a precocity they usually share with four-year-olds) without the author having to explain why. But there, likewise, lies the problem for the fictionist: Just as it would in the law, madness absolves the character of any moral responsibility, because your character has no real understanding of the choices he or she faces, and of their consequences. And without moral responsibility, there’s no real conflict.
True evil (I’m using the term here to apply to the fictional adversary) knows exactly what it wants and what it’s doing. It has a mind, it plans, it executes, it responds creatively to changing situations. And sometimes we can’t see it for what it is. It isn’t even necessarily a tangible person, but rather a presence, an invasive yet also a seductive force.
And so, to do right by goodness, we have to do right by evil as well, and present it as freshly and as carefully as we might construct a hero’s character, lavishing detail upon detail, nuance upon nuance. It has to be memorable; it has to be deliberate; at best (or at worst), it has to have been given a fair chance to repudiate or redeem itself – failing or refusing which it will now fight goodness to the death.
The day evil becomes generic or forgettable is the day it wins, because we will cease to recognize it and to care. The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt’s oft-quoted phrase "the banality of evil" comes to mind, although there has been much lively debate about what exactly Arendt meant by it.
What I know (or think I know; philosophers have a way of tripping you up) is that it’s no longer enough for the fiction writer to show what a rotten, unjust, and dangerous world we live in – we knew that, already, just by watching the TV news. We have to provide more novel insights into the complexities of the moral maze or minefield we daily tread.
That said, I don’t think it’s for fiction (at least short realist fiction) to solve the problems it poses and turn the world into a better place ("for you and for me and the entire human race," as Michael Jackson might have suggested). Oppressed characters can begin to comprehend their situation and even resolve to fight back; even oppressors can reach some point of self-awareness and ponder issues of responsibility and redemption. But you can’t turn the universe around in 10 or 15 pages; that’s what novels are for – they have the wingspan for the kind of sweep or lift the battered spirit needs, once in a while.
And maybe, in this long-winded way, I’ve just answered another of my pet questions ("Why don’t we have more happy stories?") – bad things can happen very quickly, while good things often take time and space and heroic effort to materialize.
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