I had planned this week to construct a subtle analysis of the shadow archetype, leading delicately, carefully, to introduce the topic of evil and its use and misuse in fantasy. I planned it, I did my reading, took notes, and then….
Instead of writing over the weekend I surrendered to the siren call of the summer and, with friends and family, covered twenty miles of river by kayak. It’s awfully hard to pick up the threads of Jungian analysis and the deconstruction of evil after two days of this:
Too bucolic for darkness
I confess, between kayaking all weekend and paying attention to the start of the convention and all the day’s political drama, I’ve made a hash out of today’s diary.
It’s going to take me a while to unpick all the threads and weave them into something comprehensible. So instead of a Jungian analysis of shadows and darkness, let’s tackle this beast straight on—let’s talk about the problem of evil in fantasy.
Ugh. “The problem of evil” — such a banal phrase. As if evil is a problem to be solved. As if evil is something we could get our arms around either in life or in literature. As if evil is something we can comprehend. I’m starting out on the losing side this week, since everything I write is going to be, must be, woefully inadequate. Still, we gotta eat this elephant somehow.
In fantasy, evil gets a bad rap for being the go-to adversary for every stalwart hero to grace the pages of a third-rate knockoff. In these treatments, evil is simple: malevolent, mindless, cruel, unselfconscious: it is the Black Tower, the Wicked Witch, the Dark Lord, the orcs, drow elves, Paul Manafort…. We know what to think about evil—it’s the force that The Good Guys struggle against, are almost overcome by, that Thing that occasionally gobbles up a red shirt and tortures the hero, but inevitably will collapse right at the point of its inevitable victory...that evil. The kind that has led to a shorthand D&D classification system for evil: Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic—but all evil; the kind that has set up the Granddaddy of all overused clichés: Good vs. Evil.
Let us dispense (for now, anyway) with cliché, with the patented D&D classification system, and with the third-rate knockoff.
Let us also disregard the more contemporary development in fantasy novels toward the anti-hero (also known as the Jaime Lannister Syndrome). We’ll deal with anti-heroes later; they’re permutations of a type that have become clichés all on their own.
No, let’s go for the jugular: what is evil and how does it manifest in fantasy?
The trouble with the subject of evil in fantasy is two-fold. On one hand, duh. You always know who the villains are. There’s nothing subtle about them. The Dark Lord, after all, is called The Dark Lord for a reason, and no one is going to ever mistake Randall Flagg for a white-hat sort of fellow. Voldemort, Sauron, Audrey II — they’re easy to pick out in a crowd.
On the other hand, as evil in fantasy is unsubtle, so is the analysis of evil—and it’s all over the place. Everyone has a stalking horse in advancing the “evil in fantasy” trope, and most contemporary blogs that discuss fantasy agree that traditional black hat villains are out of vogue and anti-heroes are all the rage, while evil is eternal and we must all struggle against whatever we agree is evil unless the whole idea is passé and….snore…….
So, if we thread our way between the Hit-you-over-the-head-with-doctor-evil and the Blogspot-summarizes-existential-evil-in-300-words-or-less poles, we can drag ourselves to a dry hummock in the swamp, a washover island in the river, as it were: how is evil presented in fantasy literature, and why?
This is a tougher question than you might at first suppose. If we disregard theology (let’s do that; we’re discussing literature far more than philosophy), we have to grapple with the idea of what evil is:
- is it an active force?
- is it born of malevolence or neglect (or a combination of the two)?
- is it inherent in one’s nature, in one’s breed? If so, can it be overcome? A restatement of this would be, “Can there be a good demon?”
- is one born evil or made evil, and what forces combine to produce it?
These kinds of things keep me up at night.
In my survey of the literature, I see two things that motivate a villain. One is the fear of death, the unwillingness to surrender personality, identity or even his or her place in the world. The second is narcissism. And, yes, the first is a subset of the second, but it’s the death-fleeing narcissist who makes a classic villain, someone understandable even if not relatable, whether it’s Her Darkness in Neil Gaiman’s “The Sleeper and the Spindle” who steals her people’s sleep to preserve her youth, Harry Potter’s nemesis Voldemort, or even Tolkien’s Saruman, definitely a Grade-B bad guy, especially compared to Sauron, but whose revenge is limited to malicious vandalism in the Shire until Wormtongue cuts his throat.
To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman, a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing. (1, p. 300)
Saruman, being Gandalf’s counterpart, is the more relatable of the villains, and his death evokes more pathos than does Sauron’s destruction, mostly because Sauron is not a personality but a force; his demise comes with volcano and earthquake and collapse. But Saruman dies. What rises from his body is a last hope of redemption, redemption unearned and unfulfilled. Yes, he deserves it, but that last look to the West humanizes Saruman at the very end of his life, and remains as an image of what he might have been.
Somewhat like the image of Voldemort as a fetus in the railway station where Harry Potter meets Dumbledore in The Deathly Hallows; so thoroughly has he shredded his soul that there’s almost nothing left. Almost. He might not recognize that, but we do, and Harry does. And that little shard of humanity is what makes Harry’s victory victory; he recognizes that Tom Riddle was once a person remarkably like himself, his very shadow. That recognition reinforces Dumbledore’s advice to Harry that a person’s choices determine his fate, not his abilities (and, not for nothing, the name Voldemort means flee from death).
Oh dear, now we’ve stumbled to where I went off the rails to start with—the shadow, the image in the mirror. We’ll get back there next week. In the meantime, we’ve had a week in Cleveland that could have been scripted by H.P. Lovecraft himself, and high drama tonight, so let’s talk about our favorite (fantasy) villains.
Previous Installments
Notes
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1988.