AvV: An experiment in literary science across three periods

Part the First: In which I am reminded of Igor and the abby normal brain

There are a few things in my life that I have learned to not even bother to keep secret. One is my fascination with specimens of the macabre and my ongoing collection of oddities. Another is my absolutely abysmal taste in friends. Combined, these two eccentricities have gone a long way toward insulating me from the unexpected; yet I was taken completely by surprise when there came a rap on my bathroom door, and a high-pitched voice intruded on my privacy.

"Hey Professor, I brought you a present!"

One of my other unhidden secrets is my association with the fey, most often in the form on one socially challenged (by human standards) hairy gruach named Puck. In fairness, this may not be a separate category of eccentricity; it may be a corollary of my poor choice of friends.

"Puck, you hirsute idiot, I'm in the bathroom!" I shouted back.

My displeasure didn't seem to register properly in his fairy brain. "No kidding," he replied. "That's why I'm yelling through the door. It would be kind of silly for me to be standing here if you were in your lab."

When dealing with the fair folk, it's important to know when you're licked unless you actually want ulcers. "I'll be done in a minute. Meet me in the office."

"You mean I can't come in?"

I refused to answer. After a particularly abstruse troll had invaded the lavatory, I replaced the old brass doorknob with one made of iron. If I hadn't, Puck would have come in anyway.

By the time I reached my office, Puck had already made himself to home and chased off the cat. He sat cross-legged on my desk, his back leaning against a dingy specimen jar. "See?" he said, jerking a long thumb over his shoulder toward the jar. "A present. It's an Extreme Substitute Antagonist."

I made a noncommittal sound and settled into my roller chair. "And where did you find this—umm—item?"

"It was in the trash behind the lit. department," he answered happily. I suppressed a groan. The literature department—in fact all literature departments—and I have had an ongoing feud for years. The reasons are simple: I write professionally, and they're stupid. An entire host of specifics derive from there. Of course, I write for people who read, as opposed to people who sit in ivory towers and critique, so what do I know about literature? According to them, I pander to the ignorant mob (or as I like to call them, the paying customers and dedicated supporters). Just a trifle of a disagreement there. Don't even get me started on the so-called art department.

Still, I had never heard of an Extreme Substitute Antagonist and I hefted the jar to take a look. The liquid preservative of the jar—probably formalism, the literary equivalent of formaldehyde—was viscous and dark, making the exact details of its contents difficult to make out. The general outline was familiar and something nagged at my memory. "Puck," I said, "did this come with a label?"

"That's how I knew what it was," he replied, passing me a yellowed slip of paper that had once been affixed to the jar before age sapped the vitality from its glue.

The label read "Antagonist, sub., ext." Puck's guess at its meaning was not unreasonable, but I laughed anyway. "You're off by just a little," I told him. This says Antagonist, Subcategory, Extinct. Puck, m'boy, what you have here is a villain."

"A villain?" he said. His shoulders sagged in disappointment. "Just a plain old bad guy. I thought I had something neat."

"Ah, but you do. An antagonist is just the opposition to the protagonist, an opponent or adversary in a contest. But your villain here is much more colorful. He's a wicked, unprincipled character, guilty or capable of gross wickedness, who opposes a hero. The villain is a specialized form of antagonist—they got that part right—but while all villains are antagonists, not all antagonists are villains."

Puck shrugged. "A bad guy is a bad guy."

"Not at all," I countered. " The antagonist-protagonist relationship is one of individual conflict; the villain-hero relationship is a proxy fight for the universal battle between good and evil. The reasons for an antagonist's opposition are as grand or as banal as the motives of the protagonist. But the villain...when he shows up, we're talking about a real conflict, something of merit. Something worth fighting for, unequivocally."

"Too many fancy words. You lost me."

I nodded. "Look at it this way. Antagonists are simple. Two kids fight for a toy, they're antagonists. Cops and robbers are antagonists. Anything that keeps the protagonist, the main character, from getting what he wants is an antagonist. Follow me so far?" The gruach nodded. "Now, what really moves people when they read are motives, why the characters do what they do. The two kids, they're antagonists but their motives are, well, childish. That won't grab a reader; it's shallow. But two soldiers fighting each other, they're fighting for something. The reader gets that and they appreciate it. Bigger fights and higher stakes make for better motives and better motives make for better reading. Good and evil are the highest stakes of all."

"Big fights are better. Got it."

"It's not that simple. The size of the conflict is not directly proportionate to its effect in the story. Small conflicts are okay and besides, not all stories are life and death. But if you really want to write something significant, then the stakes for the protagonist—for the hero—have to be significant as well." I tapped the jar with the end of a pen and watched the liquid swirl. "What baffles me is how they decided the villain was a dead form."

Puck bounced to his feet. "I know that one." He cleared his throat and continued in a pompous tone. "The villain is merely a simple form of the antagonist, typically presented in a comedic and overtly moralistic way. This clearly indicates that he/she is less useful than a well-conceived antagonist, and therefore has been phased out of meaningful literature. Her/his specialization has contributed to his/her obsolete nature and her/his moralist basis proves that he/she is a thing of the past." He arched his eyebrows and folded his long-fingered hands together, looking pleased with himself.

"You've been eavesdropping on the modern lit. classes, haven't you?"

He nodded enthusiastically. "Feminist studies, too."

I shook my head. Puck worked as a spy for the fairy court, trying to learn about the current state of humanity and when and how the fey could return to the world. I figure that his stay at the university has set back human-fairy relations by at least a century.

"And why, Mister Pretend Professor Puck, does having a moralist basis prove that the villain is passé?"

"Relativity. Humanity has outgrown such simplistic notions. The basis of conflict in modern literature is competing truths, with the reader as the jury."

I gave him a glare that made him back away from me and rose completely out of my chair. "What a total crock. If they'd bother to wander over into cultural studies, they'd notice that there is a universal human moral baseline. There are variations, but the basic ideas of good and evil are consistent throughout the human condition. It's an archetype, for crying out loud!

"The villain-hero relationship embodies, no mere clash of individuals, but an elemental conflict of the human condition on all its fronts. The villain represents a threat to the hero's country and creed, race and religion, and the very bedrock upon which his stable society rests. The antagonist opposes the hero; a villain opposes him while holding all he holds dear in the universe, including the hero's own identity, as hostage against his failure. Most 'coming of age' tales involve an exchange of innocence for power on the part of the hero. In order to combat the villain, he must 'grow up' and take a part of the villain into himself to preserve the innocence of his world. Confronting villainy cannot leave the hero unscathed. The haunting theme of 'you can never go home again' runs throughout a significant body of literary work. Plus, the thematic seduction of evil directly engages the reader. Ever find yourself rooting for the bad guy? This is not an accident; it is good writing." I threw myself back into my seat.

"Feel better?" Puck asked.

I sighed. "Now do you see why I'm not allowed in the lit. department anymore? Those bozos are throwing away their best tools. Sure, the villain is specialized, but that doesn't make him weaker, it makes him stronger. Assuming he's used for what he was designed for. Use him wrong and you both look like idiots." I sighed again. "Dead, is he? Puck, take our villain down to the lab and let's have a closer look at him."

Part the second: In which we find a premature proclamation of death

Puck set the jar on the shallow metal table in the middle of the room then headed towards the shelves. "Which tool set are we using? Socrates? Aristotle? No, wait—let's use the bone saw! It makes better noises."

"Actually," I said, pulling a stool to the table and sitting, "I was thinking of something more like Edmund Wilson."

"Use a what?"

"Edmund Wilson. He was a Modernist critic in the forties. Declared that the entire horror genre was dead. Wilson reduced everything to humanism and rationalism, kind of like whoever declared the villain dead. That's a pretty common scheme, criticism by autopsy. If you declare something dead in literature, it's a lot easier to study it. Especially since it makes the critic immune to the nasty surprises of reality. I've heard sci-fi and fantasy declared dead about six times in my lifetime alone."

"I didn't think writing had been around that long," he said innocently, gazing up at the shelves.

I gave him a harsh stare through my eyebrows anyway. "Pull down the agars. If we want to see if this thing is dead, the fastest way is to give it a chance to live."

Puck dragged a chair across the room then began piling boxes on top of it until the precarious tower was high enough for him to reach what he wanted. Since I couldn't stop him, I chose not to notice. "What I don't get," he said as he clambered up, "is how the villain can be dead in literature if he exists in reality? In the fairy, we've got all kinds of nasty things running around but even here it's kind of hard to ignore people like Hitler, Stalin, and Rather."

"Rather?" I wasn't really paying attention. Opening the jar was proving to be tricky and I definitely didn't want to spill any of it on myself.

"Dan Rather, the guy who does the propaganda. I mean, how can they say no villains when they're real."

Only the sickly smell of the jar's preservative kept me from laughing aloud. The fairy have a poor understanding of politics, much less the public press, and Puck's was worse than most. Not that I was going to argue with him. "Part of the reasoning goes back to relativism. Hitler wasn't evil, just operating under a different value system. And, too, they classified the villain dead as an effective literary antagonist, which is different than saying villains don't exist. The thing is..." I paused while I cut away sections of the brown lump inside the jar, moving them into sterile jars of their own before I continued. "The thing is, there are authors who don't use villains and who shouldn't. And not every story is about morality. No, my worry is, the villain is a very powerful tool, and it's foolish to throw away good tools. Personally, I think that if our literature department is calling the villain dead, there's more afoot."

Puck tossed petri dishes onto the table, sending them spinning like over-grown plastic coins, then climbed up himself. "Oooh, a conspiracy. These are always fun."

"Nothing so grand as that. Just a new front on an old war." I began to round up the dishes and sort them into rows. "They're still trying to do away with the hero. Without villains, there are no heroes. No heroes, no triumph—no great duties or superhuman aspirations. This is just another attempt by modern critics to do away with absolutes." I gave Puck a tired smile. "One begins a circle drawing anywhere."

He replied by making a circling gesture with one finger around his temple. "Prof, what would you do without your hate?"

"What do you mean?"

"If all the stuff that bugs you all the time got fixed and you had nothing left to hate, what would you do?" He looked serious, so I answered.

"That's what I have friends like you for, Puck."

The hairy fey grinned. "Thanks. That's kind of sweet."

"Yep," I concluded, "with friends like you, there'll always be somebody to get on my nerves."

Puck made a sour face then asked, "What're we doing with all this?"

"I've got the agar sorted into three types, one for each major form of literary conflict. Man versus man. Man versus nature. Man versus himself." I pointed to the different rows as I spoke. "Now, if the villain is still a viable antagonist, it should be able to survive in some form in each medium of conflict. So," I began to place the slivers of the lump from the jar into the dishes, "we introduce the sample into the agar and see what grows. We'll come back down tomorrow and take a look at what we've got, and then we'll know if the villain is really dead."

"I don't know," Puck shook his head cautiously. "Making monsters is kind of risky. What if one of your literary creations gets out into reality and then it's a serial killer and it always wears dark glasses because it actually doesn't have eyes, it just has these mouths with sharp teeth in the eye sockets and—"

"Puck, you read too many comic books," I told the breathless gruach. "Nonetheless, climb back up on your tower of Pisa over there and bring down the allegorical wards. It wouldn't do to take chances."

Part the third: In which I lecture a lot pointlessly and lack a good title

The experiment proved a bit more vigorous than I had anticipated. The speed of the results was surprising. I'd expected it to take at least a week for the cultures to develop into anything visible to the naked eye. Instead, each of the petri dishes was almost bubbling over with an amorphous ichor as we entered the lab the next day.

"It worked," whispered Puck excitedly. "Do you think it'll eat us?"

"Don't be silly," I chided him. "Make slides of that stuff and I'll get the 'scope ready."

"Which one first?"

I shrugged. "Man versus man is the most common, start with that one. It'll probably look like a little French-Canadian guy with a handlebar mustache."

I was wrong. The mass on the slide looked more like the commandant from Steinbeck's The Moon is Down. "I should have expected that," I said after a moment.

"Expected what?" asked Puck, anxious to push past me and have a look for himself.

I stepped back to let him inspect at his leisure. "We were talking about the Hitlers and Stalins of the world, but I forgot the proxy effect of the villain."

"Which is?"

"Well, Hitler wasn't the only man to stand trial at Nuremberg. Were the minders of the gas chambers any less villainous? I forgot that the villain doesn't have to be the big bad guy—in fact, less is more in writing—because the villain is a symbolic character. The villain represents the evil; he only has to be that big for the story and no more. Matter of fact, a villain too grand or too removed from the hero's own context becomes a parody. That's part of what makes him a good tool; he can play a lot of roles. An overblown villain is a great comedic foil. By the same token, a little villain, a kind of guy next door who's gone over the edge, can be even more threatening than a huge galactic tyrant," I explained.

"Okay. But what's that?" Puck gestured toward the slide, forgetting that I wasn't sharing the eyepiece. I finally got him to move and found what had caught his attention.

"That, dear boy, is the faceless villain."

"That some kind of bad guy that fights mutant superheroes?"

"Far more insidious than that, I'm afraid. In most dystopian writing the villain is not a specific individual but a creeping invisible mob of pressures and unseen hands, like Orwell's monitors and Brunner's mob mindset of the human machine. Think about it: in Zamyatin's We, is the true villain the Benefactor or the society that enables him and the doctors who perform the 'Great Operation'? Or if you prefer grimmer, real-life examples, what about the men of the Soviet Politburo who authorized the Ukrainian famine and the Moslem mobs of Darfur?

"It definitely proves that the villain is alive, though. Not only that, but if you'll look closely, even the attributes within each of those cells looks just like the whole. There again, it's because of the symbolism. Since he's an avatar, a living proxy for evil if you will, a villain can be of malleable size; as large as an entire society or as small as any individual within it." I moved away from the 'scope and straightened to rest my back. "Bring up our next slide."

"I don't know if we did this one right," Puck said as he slid it into the clip. "It's all green and leafy, like a plant. Maybe it got something else in it. Take a look."

I adjusted the eyepiece and stared at the mass of foliage. "Looks like a jungle. Which mix was this?"

"Man versus nature."

"Ah." I stepped aside and waved him toward the 'scope. "Well, that's rather Joseph Conrad."

"How so?"

"The jungle of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is more than just plants. It was the villain, an embodied evil. Because the villain is a representative of evil, nature fits the guise all too well when you think about it. It is savage, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and threatening to the stability of man. If man's first fear was the night and his first myths created to personify the natural forces that threatened him, that would make nature was man's first villain."

Puck looked up and his face brightened considerable. "Good. I was afraid we'd have to try again. I had trouble making the slide because there wasn't very much of it."

I lifted my shoulders in a lazy shrug. "Very few writers use nature as a villain, probably because it is the most difficult form to execute. Others, like Jack London, choose to use nature as a background where the real villainy of man versus man or man versus himself plays out."

A thought struck me, and I rubbed the bridge of my nose where my glasses usually rest as I puzzled it through. "You know, part of the man versus nature is man versus the elemental or the primal. That would make nature as a villain pretty common in fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy especially: barrow mounds and cemeteries are allowed to be evil places without a great burden of explanation. Grendel's mother and the Great Wyrm of Beowulf were forces of nature. When you look at it, most monstrous hordes of fantasy are variations of nature as a villain, described repeatedly more like a flood or a wildfire than actual creatures.

"Tolkien's Sauron was an example of nature as a villain. I mean, true, Sauron had a name and lip service was paid to his individuality but, as he was presented in the Lord of the Rings, he was not a person or a thing. He was an implacable force of nature."

I paused, then took the thought a step further. "In science fiction one of the foundational themes is nature as the adversary upon which man must impose his will. When nature fights back with anything resembling coherency or personality, it becomes a villain. With some writers like LeGuin, nature is consistently a villain, and acts with a Gaean will and identity." I stopped, then nodded again. "Yes, I think we can safely say that nature as a villain is uncommon and often unintentional as well as terribly difficult to execute; but it can fill the role. What's next?"

"Man versus himself." Puck scurried across the lab and returned with the final slide. "This thing was about to spill over. But that makes sense."

"Why's that?" I asked, bending to peer at the sample.

"Well, if it's man versus himself, and if the portion of himself that he was in opposition to was not considered by the man to be evil, then there would not be much of a conflict."

"Well put," I complimented him, gesturing him to the 'scope. "You might go so far as to say that most literature where man versus himself, it's really man versus the villain in himself. Think about all of those coming of age tales. The exchange of innocence for power is coin of the realm in this type of conflict. That exchange, as we saw earlier, is a key part of the villain in writing."

"Looks clear to me," Puck announced, clicking off the light on the 'scope. "The villain is alive." Then he grinned and shouted, "It's alive!"

"Stop it."

"I've always wanted to do that," he snickered.

"Yes, well, we'll have to be very careful when we clean up, that's for sure."

"Why?"

I answered him over one shoulder as I began to gather up my tools. "Because the villain is a symbol. That means that even the smallest villain can bring an unrivaled threat to bear on the hero without overshadowing the rest of the story. Debatably, the villain can be nearly invisible, felt rather than seen on stage. I don't want to chance that cluttering up the lab." I piled the slides and perti dishes in the sink. "Bottom line is, the villain raises the stakes for the hero to levels that other forms of antagonism cannot. By raising those stakes for the hero, if done well the villain also raises them for the reader. The villain sets the bar for the hero—the greater the opposition, the greater the growth of the hero—and symbolically for all mankind.

"And that means that despite whatever our ultra-enlightened literary department thinks, the use of the villain creates the potential for not merely good writing, but great writing—a potential that would otherwise not be present."

Puck shrugged happily and climbed onto the table where he could watch me do the actual work of cleaning up his mess. "As long as you're happy," he chirped. "I just like it when we can make messes. If this villain stuff is so powerful, how're you going to clear it all out?"

I shrugged. "The only match for a villain is a good hero. With a solid plot as a binding agent you can neutralize them. I suppose I've got a lot more writing to do."