I THINK MOST READERS are basically law-abiding. I, for instance, do not wish to be Humbert Humbert, Nabokov’s molester of young girls. Nor John Gardner’s Grendel, however charming he may be; there’s no real attraction in a career path that involves eating Vikings. And certainly not Anthony Burgess’s young thug Alex, with his droogies in tow. We may chafe at rules, but we follow them. Well, mostly. But in fiction we get to transgress, or at least watch from nearby while others transgress. We can watch others in the movies, too, but film is essentially a voyeuristic medium in which we observe passively. Fiction puts us into the action, allowing us to identify with the characters in very personal ways. We can, if we choose, work our way into the terror of being a child pickpocket in Victorian London, the elation of the old ultraviolence, the thrill of breaking every rule of civilized society or even of Hogwarts, the outrage and anger of Ned Kelly on his crime spree, all while safely ensconced in our Barcalounger.
Once upon a time, there was a good guy and a bad guy. The story was about the good guy. The bad guy was only let into the story—on parole, as it were—because things needed to happen to the hero, things he couldn’t make befall him on his own. Don Quixote de la Mancha may be delusional, but his heart’s in the right place. Tom Jones? Bit of a rake, but a definite good guy. David Copperfield, Oliver Twist? Why, they’re just kids. What could they have done wrong? And boy, do they have villains. Fagan, Bill Sikes, Uriah Heep, nasty schoolmasters and scheming rivals. Dickens’s heroes may be a bit fey, his heroines idealized cardboard, but what great scoundrels! The thing that really fired his imagination was wickedness. Protagonists may have been naughty or misguided on occasion—Huck Finn is no saint, and Hardy’s heroes are clearly works-in-progress—but they were essentially good.
Then something went very badly wrong.
In the twentieth century, we begin to meet genuinely evil central characters, such as Robert Musil’s Moosbrugger in his novel The Man Without Qualities (1930, 1942). Moosbrugger was famously characterized by the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs as “a mentally-retarded sexual pervert with homicidal tendencies.” These characters, who occupy the role traditionally held by the hero but who lack nearly all his qualities—or embody his opposites—are often called “anti-heroes.” This term is vague to the point of uselessness, yet, as with so many literary terms, it’s what we have. The critic Ihab Hassan, who wrote an early book, Radical Innocence (1961), on the phenomenon, prefers the term “rebel-victim,” although that, too, may miss the mark, since it ignores the narrative centrality that “anti-hero” captures. Whatever we may call it, this new development marks a shift: Oilcan Harry has muscled Mighty Mouse out of the center of the frame and made the story be about him. Where once the protagonist was the good if flawed star of the show, while the villain was consigned to the story’s margins, in the modern age, often there is no good guy and the protagonist is deeply blemished, if perhaps possessing one or two endearing qualities.
Nice work if you can get it.
Okay, so a lot of anti-heroes are basically misguided souls looking to do a little better, like Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom or Bellow’s Augie March. Or Henderson. Or pretty much any Bellow main character. The point is, while they may screw up on a pretty regular basis, they aren’t really evildoers. Often, as with Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly in The True History of the Kelly Gang, they may be outlaws, but they nevertheless compel our sympathy But then there is the fringe element. Real bad actors hogging the spotlight.
Let’s say you were going to write a novel. Consider the attributes you would want your main character to have. Now consider the ones that are unthinkable. He lies. He’s heartless. He is sexually obsessed with young girls. He likes it that way. He’s cruel. He is without conscience. He molests an adolescent. He thinks that’s all right. He marries a woman he does not love in order to get close to her daughter. He drives the poor woman to her death. He transports his victim across many state lines—and every moral boundary—for immoral purposes. He actively murders another human being. He believes himself justified in having done so. At this point, if you have any common sense, you run the other direction. There’s no way you can write that novel.
Nabokov could. And did. Lolita may have outraged them in the hinterlands, but it proved a succès de scandale of the first order. Only a genius could write this novel and get away with it. Nabokov’s friends told him he was crazy to attempt it, that it would never be published, that it could even result in criminal charges. No American publisher would touch it. After the Olympia Press in Paris published it and Graham Greene called it one of the best novels of 1954, the British banned the book, with the French following suit. So of course, its fame was made. When it was finally published in the United States four years later, it was a huge success. Many people read it, and many of them misread it, of whom more than a few were, evidently, pornographers. Newspapers in the 1960s were filled with ads for movies called Teenage Lolitas (which strikes one as redundant), More Teenage Lolitas, and Lots More Teenage Lolitas. Terribly highbrow stuff, no doubt. Even on the legitimate side of the street, “Lolita” became code for a certain type of sexual misconduct, as well as for a certain kind of dirty book, which only goes to show that not only purveyors of smut have trouble with irony. For irony is one of the weapons Nabokov uses to manage his materials, including his very bad protagonist. The author despises his creation, but he never tells us so, never says, “This is one bad hombre,” not even, “Don’t try this at home.” He lets Humbert Humbert rhapsodize about the desirability of his nymphet, about what the ideal measurements and appearance of body parts are for a not yet sexually ripe female, about his own obsessions, while never inserting his authorial scowl—or smirk—into the mix. Lets him, in other words, hang himself with his own words. And hang himself he does, because of those words.
You see, Humbert is an addict. No, not of young girls. Though ugly, appalling, and stomach-turning, that’s ultimately a mere obsession. But the thing he’s addicted to, the thing that gets Nabokov off the hook, is language. The guy’s besotted with words. He never met a pun he didn’t like. He loves double entendres, anagrams, tricky reversals of linguistic expectation, false names. Now all of these features can be found in most Nabokovian narratives, but here the author makes special use of them by handing them over to his character.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-leeta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
If he’ll go that far in the paragraphs where we first meet him, there can be no limits. The manic alliteration of the two consonants of her nickname, the obscene description of the formation of her name in the mouth (one feels one’s tongue deserves a severe cleansing after that sentence), the many ways he finds to emphasize her youth and smallness—all this is the work of an obsessive personality. He is often artful and coy in revealing his revolting conduct, as when he says he “deceived [Charlotte] with one of Lolita’s anklets” or when he describes in terms of beauty and the beast (the beast being not the entire Humbert but only that portion being gratified) a masturbatory session of rubbing against the child that culminates in “the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.” Reveal it he does, though, because the lure of words is too strong for him. He seems to think his beautiful narrative justifies his hideous behavior, that lovely words spruce up a moral dung-heap. His creator, of course, knows this assumption to be false but keeps that knowledge to himself. Instead, he lets Humbert keep talking.
To be sure, all that talking demonstrates that the speaker is a tolerably bad individual. But it also shows him to be brilliant, insightful, linguistically gifted, and charming. A bit disconcerting, being charmed by a snake? Yes, but there it is. That’s a lot of how we can put up with him, knowing what we do. He’s good company. And that’s the point. He has to be something. It’s written in the Law of Bad Actors: We will follow the exploits of villain-heroes, but only if they give us something in return. In Humbert’s case, that something is charm.
Same thing with Alex. Same thing with Grendel. They’re amusing, witty, verbally clever, and—strange to say of monstrous beings—ingratiating. Burgess imbues Alex with an Elizabethan sensibility; his wordplay is worthy of a Shakespeare hero—intricate, formal, quick, sharp, and full of aggression. Grendel’s charm lies in his anachronisms: he knows things about the world, like cinematic jump-cuts, that no human of his time could possibly know. He seems to have access to the major schools of philosophical thought, none of which will exist for several hundred years after he ceases to. And then, he’s surprisingly personable for someone who could, quite literally, bite your head off. Grendel’s also able to make his case as a misunderstood victim: he didn’t choose to be a monster, didn’t get to select his mother, had no say in the irrational terror humans feel at his mere appearance. This approach has the advantage of being true, mostly, although we have to ignore his predations against their livestock and the tremendous strength that allows him to dispatch a bullock with a single blow to the spine. Oh, and the atrocious table manners, including some very untidy blood guzzling. Still, murderer or no, he is a victim.
Murderers have often made good company. John Banville won acclaim and prizes for The Book of Evidence (1989), a novel that follows the life of a confessed murderer, Freddie Montgomery. The novel is less a crime tale than a confession in the classic sense; Freddie writes his narrative not to exculpate his crime but to indict his life. The brutal murder of a maid in the course of robbery is less important than his inability or refusal to imagine her as having a life worth living separate from his own reality. Tough claim to make when the manner of the killing involves repeated strikes with a hammer. Even so, the argument has resonance: if one denies the autonomy or inherent value of other persons, nearly any level of violence becomes possible. Like Alex, like Humbert, Freddie wins readers over with his mix of sharpness and verbal ability.
So there’s one approach—let the bad actor have the microphone. He can talk his way into readers’ hearts, use that charm to win us over. But what about when he lacks that charm? Or is missing all the sympathy markers we’ve come to know and love? What, in a word, if he’s Michael O’Kane? Edna O’Brien took readers in a new and immensely disturbing direction in her novel In the Forest (2002), based on the real-life case of Brendan O’Donnell, who in 1994 kidnapped and murdered a young mother and her son as well as a priest. O’Kane is a victim of circumstance and biology, to be sure, but he’s also a genuinely frightening figure, a “Kindershrek,” one who—quite properly in his case—frightens young children. (Adults, too, if they’ve any sense.) Throughout his life he has suffered loss and humiliation. His mother died when he was small, although he could never process that information, insisting that “they” had smothered her by burying her alive. The men in his life all either failed him or actively abused him, and his treatment in a juvenile detention center with the Kafkaesque name the Castle was beyond criminal. From his earliest days he was invariably scapegoated for any crime in the vicinity.
And yet, and yet. He is without redeeming qualities. There’s no remorse in him, nothing but anger and resentment. His violence is not artful; it’s ugly, irrational, terrifying. He is utterly without charm. His linguistic abilities are quite limited. He’s no Humbert, no Alex, no Grendel. From a human standpoint, he’s an appalling specimen; from a novelist’s perspective, an intriguing problem. In almost any other age, he would be a villain, held at arm’s length from the narrative. Going back to the gothic novel, we find characters who are abundantly villainous, yet they require very little of the reader emotionally or even intellectually. Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolfo and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk supply baddies aplenty, especially the latter with its depraved clerics and Gestapo-quality inquisitors. Those villains, however, are cardboard cutouts, frightening because of their actions rather than their proximity to reality, which is roughly that of Dracula, Bram Stoker’s gothic nightmare figure. Romanticism gave us the Byronic hero and Heathcliff, but Emily Brontë imbues her hero with more torment than malice; her aim is pity rather than revulsion. O’Brien, it seems to me, is after something different. And riskier.
But what? Sympathy is out of the question, given O’Kane’s loathsome conduct. Even in early childhood, when readers might be tempted to feel sorry for him given the terrible things that befall him, Michen, as he is known, is difficult, unresponsive, and slightly alien. His responses never square with our expectations of an approximately normal human being. As he matures and his relationship with the world becomes increasingly strained, his behavior more bizarre, we find ourselves more and more estranged. Well, what then? If an emotional response, or at least a sympathetic one, seems unavailable, then what is O’Brien’s purpose in telling this terrible story? The novel’s long suit has always been emotional identification. That’s why readers wept at the death of Little Nell and sent character suggestions on who should marry whom to Thackeray midserialization. It’s why we’re so conflicted about Gatsby and Heathcliff.
Long suit, but not only suit. The novel has always proved itself capable of multiple uses, one of which is analysis or intellection. It can be a vehicle for sympathy or dread, but also for rational understanding. In this case, we’re asked to make rational sense of an irrational being, to stand at the edge and peer into the abyss. O’Brien never makes excuses for Michen’s behavior or asks that he be let off the hook. Even as we’re tempted to feel sorry for him, she reminds us that he’s not that special, that other children have come through difficult early lives without committing horrific acts of violence. Instead, she gives what sympathy the novel bestows to his victims, Eily Ryan and her child, Maddie, and the priest who offers him sympathy, Father John. Their only qualifications for their roles seem to be that they overlap with O’Kane’s memories and psychotic fantasies. To think about the unthinkable: that’s one possible explanation.
There’s another prospect, though, a source much older than novels. Here’s a hint: Michael O’Kane. Though he’s called Michen, the name most reviewers and reporters have used in referring to him, we forget his proper name at our peril. The archangel Michael, of course, is the great enemy of Satan and his legion, having defeated them, according to the book of Revelation, in the battle that dropped them from heaven. Ironic that the scourge of evil gives his name to a monster? Perhaps. But that monster also bears a homonym of the first murderer. To be sure, “Kane” isn’t “Cain,” but it’s close enough for government work. And as the heavenly being sometimes credited as the voice in the burning bush who spoke to Moses, Michael may be appropriate for someone who acts because he hears voices. The forest of the title, moreover, reminds us that the wilderness has stood since biblical times as a place of temptation and danger, a place where the devil operates. Something vile certainly operates in Cloosh Wood, where the murders take place. Wild speculation on my part? Perhaps. A bit obvious? Contrived? Maybe. But it has a purpose. O’Brien is investigating, as much as anything, the problem of evil: how is it that terrible things happen in our world, that people can go so badly astray? Not surprisingly, her answer has little to do with either angels or demons. Though she draws on Judeo-Christian imagery, as she often does in her work, her view of evil is profoundly earthbound. A human being enacted these horrors, and other human beings influenced his development, either through visiting awful actions upon him or, like the townspeople, standing idly by and doing nothing to stop him. With such creatures in the everyday world, she suggests, who needs supernatural explanations?
Well, then, are we simply gulls, able to be manipulated at an author’s whim? I don’t think so. We won’t embrace just any horrible person; he (or she, to be fair) has to be a very special horrible person. And presented just right. It seems to me that what this phenomenon expresses is the tremendous curiosity and capacity for intellectual understanding of readers and writers alike. We can comprehend what revolts us. We can begin to understand how awful people exist and commit terrible crimes, without being implicated or sullied by those crimes. We respond, we feel, we may even mourn, but we do not become the thing we read. There’s always a distance there that makes the situation, however terrible, bearable. That distance is the novel’s—and our—saving grace.