The Evil of a Bad Man Asserts Itself

13. The Evil of a Bad Man Asserts Itself
LITERARILY, a man is capable of two kinds of evil: the evil
which he admits is evil and which he disowns, and the evil
which spontaneously proceeds from him and for which he
feels no moral regret. Iago, a purely evil man, is a good
example of the latter; Macbeth of the former. The difference,
of course, lies in the evildoer's ethical convictions or
lack of them. And the reader will put these two types to
two entirely different uses. He will watch the purely evil
man with emotionless fascination and usually feel that the
has no insight into the workings of such a mind. But he
will identify with the evildoer who disowns his evil and is
harried by it.
The most powerful characterizations of evildoers are
undoubtedly those capable of eliciting sympathy from
audiences. As an example, take Hamlet's uncle, Claudius.
For the first half of the play only the facade of a cold and
calculating villain who is one with himself and his deeds
is shown to the spectator. Because Claudius seems entirely
at home with his evil, the spectator finds himself not emotionally
involvel with the character. But, suddenly, we are
shown Claudius on his knees asking forgiveness of God for
the murder of his brother. Throughout this repentance
speech, the spectator ceases to watch Claudius and, in a
sense, becomes him. For the remainder of the play,
Claudius is an immeasurably more full-bodied character
by virtue of this momentary sympathy he managed to
elicit. Any evil Claudius had done or will do, then becomes
truly terrifying, because the spectator is sharing the responsibility
for it.
Slick fiction never deals with true evil in this ambiguous
fashion. We will see how nominal evil can be associated
with a sympathetic character. But whatever is mean, low,
or avaricious unfailingly gets straight black and white care.
To a large, hard-working rural family was born one son
quite different from the rest. He was smaller than the others;
and, whereas his brothers and sisters were industrious, open,
healthy-minded folk, this undersized son was indolent and
covert. From the very first, he showed a gratuitously cruel
nature. As a child, he was known to torture animals and insects,
get into raging fights for no discernible reason. When
the war came, he went off to the Army, but was immediately
discharged as a psychopath. He then came home, got into
some local trouble, and was sent to prison for three years for
assault. Now he has returned again to his home town.
Almost to a man the townspeople are working folk, but the
bad son comes back in a black derby, a form-fitted overcoat,
pointed shoes, and pegged pants. He slouches about the
streets with his hands ominously plunged into his pockets.
Re spends most of his time alone at home in his room reading
cheap stories about crime and violence. Everyone in town
is certain this runty aberrant soon will get into trouble again.
They and the reader wait to see how.
His evil nature finally asserts itself. One night he sneaks
up on the elderly owner of the town grocery store just as the
old man is about to close for the night. He beats the owner
with unnecessary violence, robs the store, and is about to
leave when he is apprehended by his brothers who happened
to be passing by. They belittle him by pulling his symbolic
derby hat over his ears and then turn him over to the sheriff.
Awaiting trial, he is ragged by another prisoner in his cell.
He attacks the man and has his ribs crushed in. His end is
made to seem as ignoble as that of a squashed mosquito that
has been so improvident as to attack a fly swatter.
Dostoevski's villainous protagonists were representative
of Everyman. Their evil is so thoroughly investigated that
it seems to spring from a Freudian-necessity for which they
are not responsible. In Dostoevski's explanations of the
psychic set-ups that precipitated the evil deeds the reader
sees so many attributes which the reader recognizes to be
also in his own heart, that the evil protagonist achieves the
stature of a true hero.
The slick bad man, on the other hand, is a bug, no
more. But since he appears in human form, and since he is
the most outstanding human on the scene, care must be
taken that the reader in no way feels the writer is intimating
that this evil man represents either human kind
or even certain facets of the human mind. In other words,
those very qualities of Dostoevski's stories which make
them great literature must be studiously avoided.
To do this, the writer should guard against ascribing to
his evil character any saving attributes whatsoever. Ther e
may be no mitigating circumstances, no psychological interpretations
or qualifications which might tend to lessen
the guilt. He must be all bad, the way cancer is all bad. In
addition to these precautions against the evildoer taking
on any broad symbolic significance, he must be surrounded
by good people. Dramatically, this has the effect of pointing
up the bad man' s badness; philosophically, it puts him
into an insignificant minority.
The suspense of the story is created in a curious manner.
The writer does not establish an evil man and then bid the
reader wait to see how he will be punished. The certainty
with which the slick reader knows that the bad man will
be punished brings the suspense-potential of such a question
down below the usable level. The question which the
writer establishes is, how will the bad man' s evil assert
itself in the given story-situation. Whatever retribution
there is to be must, of course, be srrroothly and neatly introduced,
but on the whole the final punishment performs
the function merely of a wind-uP. To give it undue
prominence would be anticlimactic. Take this story.
The sheriff has never cared for a certain local, gun-totin',
no-'count character who has never been good for anything
but hiring himself out for a day's work here and there, and
bullying weaker men than himself. He is forever shooting off
his mouth and bragging about what a good shot he is.
Three years before the story opens, the braggart once drew
his gun on the son of a local ranchowner, threatening to shoot
him next time they met. The son rode off and was never seen
in town again. Everyone assumed that he had been peTma.
nently scared away. The boy's father is so ashamed of his son's
apparent cowardice, that he has never mentioned the boy to
any of the townspeople.
As the story opens it strikes the sheriff, who has been
troubled for some time about the boy's disappearance, that
it is unnatural the braggart cowboy has never boasted about
his success in frightening the boy off. This seems so unlike
the braggart that the sheriff comes to suspect foul play, and
intends to investigate. He searches the surrounding desert
land and, sure enough, finally locates the boy's bones. The
boy had not fled the town in fear. The braggart had followed
him after threatening him and shot him in the back... .
If the writer plans to attempt such a piece about evil, he
must establish the protagonist' s character immediately
and uncompromisingly. Stories exclusively about bad men
are rare enough to be off-beat fiction, and it is essential
that the reader be informed of that fact at the outset. To
do this, the writer must put his protagonist beyond the
pale immediately by ascribing to him sins which in the
slick world are indefensible. He is mean to animals, cruel
to children, beats his wife, curses his parents. He does not
respond to suffering in others. He is inordinately selfish.
He has broken the law for selfish reasons. He is devious,
untrustworthy, slandering, lustful, avaricious. The writer
need not run the whole gamut. He will find that the
reader is so well accustomed to meeting characters wh o
have understandable and forgiveable failings that any vice
presented without mitigating qualifications is sufficient to
establish the character as a heel.
Radio and television are crowded with half-hour shows
that deal with men and women who are thoroughly detestable
types and who are allowed to tell their own stories.
They follow the familiar biter-bit formula, bringing about
their own demise with their evil machinations. On television,
such stories constitute an entirely acceptable and
popular type of fiction. In the slicks, they don't--and they
never will. Why this dramatic format should be acceptable
to one advertiser-supported medium and not to another
I have no idea, except perhaps that the most popular slicks
are always assuming, in their articles and editorials as well
as in their fiction, a very righteous pose with which horror
material would be incompatible.
At any rate, a bad man telling his own story, explaining
the contours of his warped brain, is out for the top slicks.
The morally degraded protagonist is a psychopath, a subhuman
phenomenon. Slick editors never let him get near
the microphone.
category:plot lines