A brief history of narrative

This is part 3 of a series, a slight digression that ended up being a bit long. Anyway, if you’d like some context, you can read part 1 and part 2.

The Iliad is right at the beginning of western fiction. Some parts of it are utterly weird and others are quite familiar. Achilles getting into a fight with a river (and winning) is probably both at the same time: you can imagine it as part of the climax in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One thing that makes the Iliad stand out against contemporary fiction, especially the MCU, is its lack of a clear protagonist/antagonist duality. Achilles is the main character, invoked in the opening line alongside the muse, and Hector is his main opponent, but Hector is by far the more sympathetic character, popping home to see his wife and kids, and getting exasperated with his feckless younger brother, while Achilles, famously, spends most of the poem sulking because he’s not been given the slave he wants.

The interesting thing is that this lack of good vs. evil, so key to virtually all contemporary fiction, is absent not just from the Iliad but also from the rest of ancient fiction. Like Achilles, Gilgamesh is similarly basically a problem for most of the other characters he meets: his Epic begins with the people calling upon the gods to do something to distract him because he won’t stop murdering their sons, raping their daughters (and possibly also their sons, depending on the translation) and… ringing the temple bells really loud (there may be something lost in translation here, too). What we have of ancient literature doesn’t seem to be concerned so much with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but with how the gods respond to what we do here on Earth. The Greeks gave us the word ‘hero’, but their heroes don’t much resemble ours. In fact, reading Greek literature suggests you don’t really get to be a hero at all until you’ve murdered somebody (or, at minimum, thrown a huge tantrum that indirectly leads to their death).

Even up to the time of William Shakespeare, we find many heroes who don’t really do anything very heroic. In the Big Four Tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear are all, at best, flawed characters. The titular all become murderers during the course of the play, for starters. Even Edgar, who is more ‘heroic’ than Lear, fails dreadfully at everything he attempts. Beyond the big four, Henry V commits a war crime, and that’s after we’ve had to let him off the hook for rejecting poor old Falstaff at the end of IV Part 1, and for killing Hotspur. Granted, it was a battle, but Hotspur, like Hector, was the better man, murdered by history, rather than the gods.

But, in both cases, it wasn’t history or the gods (or Prince Hal or Achilles) who killed their opponents. It was Shakespeare and Homer or, in fact, it was the narrative. They die because they have to die for the plot arcs of Hal and Achilles to make sense. While Sir Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy really did die at the Battle of Shrewsbury, he certainly wasn’t killed in single combat by the Prince of Wales. Likewise, we don’t need to dig into the historicity of The Iliad to be pretty certain that, whatever happened at Troy and whatever Homer (whoever that was) knew about it, he wouldn’t have let the facts get in the way of a good climatic duel.

Drawing on ancient epic, renaissance drama and the Bible, Paradise Lost is both the first and last ‘modern’ epic: the line between good and evil could not be more apparent. His Satan has evolved into something completely different from the minor biblical figure or the butt-of-the-joke of medieval satire, or the horrifying monster depicted in Dante’s Inferno. While not a human, he’s given a recognisably human character. He can’t die, of course, but he’s definitively defeated in the context of the narrative, humiliated by being transformed into a speechless serpent ahead of the certainty of Christ’s ultimate victory over Hell.

By the time of Jane Austen, these complex dualities have started to collapse into something simpler. There’s also a further shift: the duality has crept out of tragedy and epic, and started to affect what we’d now call romance and comedy. Austen’s characters are still realistically drawn, so that the good guys have bad points and vice-versa, but there’s little ambiguity as to whether we’d prefer to see Elizabeth Bennet end up marrying Mr Darcy or Mr Wickham. Darcy is standoffish and arrogant, but he’s also genuinely noble and selfless. Even when his arrogance combines with his selflessness to make him think that he’s doing Lizzie a favour by proposing to his social inferior, he learns from his mistakes and is rewarded in the narrative for doing so. Likewise, Wickham’s good points turn out to be superficial: he’s unambiguously a wrong’un and Austen makes sure we know it.

This trend continues with Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist is so good he’s boring, while Sykes is so evil it’s implausible that he (or anyone in his vicinity) survives as long as he does. Again, in Dickens’ better work, the characters are complex and interesting, and even occasionally push back at the morals of the day, as in Bleak House, where Lady Dedlock has a child out of wedlock, but is clearly meant to be sympathetic, even though Britons looked down on single mums not only in Dickens’ time but well into the 21st century. Nevertheless, it’s always pretty clear who we’re meant to be sympathising with, so that, in David Copperfield, Uriah Heep is definitely bad even if we think that social climbing perhaps isn’t that much of a sin.

One may NOT smile and smile and be a villain, behave

Once we’d gotten used to our protagonists being heroic and our antagonists being villainous, we couldn’t stop. This, in fact, is one of the hallmarks of genre fiction: Van Helsing isn’t just a folklorist with a niche specialism in Eastern European legends and an unusually hands-on approach, he’s a crusader for God; Count Dracula isn’t just an old aristocrat looking to make a shady real estate deal, he’s the Devil on Earth. Sherlock Holmes isn’t just a good detective, he’s also strongly motivated by a sense of justice; Moriarty isn’t just a crook he’s ‘the Napoleon of crime’. Superman isn’t just a big strong dude, he’s the big blue boyscout; Lex Luthor isn’t just a scientist/CEO, he’s a megolamaniac who wants to rule the world. Etc.

In the case of these characters the desire for a straightforward hero-villain duality has manifested itself in a way that’s embedded in the narrative. Let’s go back over our examples: Hector isn’t a villain at all, but Achilles needs a near-equal to fight, so to his death Hector goes; Iago is a villain because he takes advantage of latent villainy in others, so that it’s Othello who actually commits the crime; Satan is a villain because he’s, y’know, Satan, and commits his crime in a similar way to Iago, through manipulation; Wickham is a villain because he’s selfish and dissolute; Heep is a villain because he’s manipulative and because he’s upsetting the social order that Dickens held dear. But the villainy of Dracula is qualitatively different: there is no universe in which Dracula can be a good guy and still be Dracula. His historical analogue, as the Count himself points out, was defending his homeland when he committed his crimes – a bad guy, yes, but someone who, in another story, might have been sympathetic: a Coriolanus or even a Hector. But our Count is barely a step away from Satan himself, the enemy of all humanity, all goodness. He’s impossibly, gleefully, inhumanly evil. Horror fiction is thus part of an impulse to justify narrative arcs for heroes by creating unambiguously villainous characters, against whom we can enjoy a guilt-free struggle.

What has happened here? The need for an antagonist to push a narrative arc a certain way has become something the narrative itself has to justify: it’s no longer assumed that Hector has to die because that’s what the story demands (or even because that’s what ‘really happened&rqsuo;), so the Hector-shaped character in the narrative becomes increasingly evil, to ‘justify&rqsuo; the shape of the arc that ends with their death. No one doubts Iago is worse than Othello, even though Othello has committed a grievous wrong. No one doubts that Darcy is the better man than Wickham. On the other hand, it is literally impossible to doubt that Van Helsing is a better person than Dracula; Dracula is barely a person at all.

What we have here is postmodernism: the narrative becoming self-aware, so that one way of reading Dracula is as an exploration of the nature of the antagonist in the narrative.

Back with Shakespeare, we can now read Iago and Edmund as prototypes of these later irredeemable villains. Edmund only shows a flicker of compassion much too late; it’s a transparent bid not to go to Hell. Iago, on the other hand, is almost a pantomime villain. He’s one of the earliest villains who actively claims to be evil, which is very rarely the elevator pitch used by real-life villains (Donald Trump didn’t run on the slogan ‘Make America Evil Again’). Iago only succeeds because of other people’s, mainly Othello’s, moral failings: he serves as a sort of cautionary tale.

Of course, what happens to the antagonist must, to some extent, also happen to the protagonist. As the antagonist morphs from an opponent into a dodgy character, then a true villain and finally into the embodiment of evil, the protagonist has to change too, to compensate. So, the hero has to survive: Achilles can get into a fight with the gods and come out on top in The Iliad, but when the story moves on in the rest of the cycle and he’s no longer the central figure, then he has our permission to die. Interestingly, the myth of his near-invulnerability doesn’t feature in The Iliad and appears to have been a later addition. In the earlier versions of the Epic Cycle, of which our Iliad forms only a part, he’s killed by an arrow but where it hit him isn’t specified, and his death is more an illustration of Paris’ cowardice than a climatic story beat for Achilles.

Just as later accounts of Achilles give him a supernatural invulnerability missing in the original, so genre-fiction heroes often have superpowers. Sherlock Holmes is impossibly intelligent (he is always right, always interprets the clues accurately) and also so strong that he can straighten out a poker after it’s been bent in half. Superman, the ur-superhero, started off simply impossibly strong and tough: Action Comics #1 specifies that he’s ‘faster than a speeding train’ (not faster than light, for example), that ‘nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin’ (which means a tank shell could kill or wound him) and that he can ‘leap tall buildings at a single bound’ (he can’t fly). Like Achilles, it’s only gradually that Superman’s powers came to grow out of all proportion. Some of this is for narrative purposes. In order to ratchet up the drama, he had to face increasingly dangerous obstacles, and so the writers also made him stronger in order to overcome them. More prosaically, his ability to fly came about because, when he transitioned to the big screen, constantly animating him jumping around was tedious, so the animators asked if he could fly instead. By the time of the first Christopher Reeve movie, he can move tectonic plates and turn back time. In the ’90s, he ‘died’, only to come back to life, completing the journey to becoming a Christlike figure.

Something similar tends to happen with other superheroes (Captain America goes from being the peak of human performance, i.e., a very, but not impossibly, strong man, to being able to just jump out of aeroplanes without a parachute). However they develop, the superheroes’ powers are another manifestation of what is now called ‘plot armour’. Superman doesn’t survive everything Lex Luthor throws at him just because ‘he’s the hero, so he has to’; he survives because he has superpowers. As with the villainy of the villain, here we see another aspect of the narrative – that the hero prevails – becomes not an externality driven by how narrative works, but an internal, embedded part of the hero’s character. The functions of narrative are, again, justified within the narrative itself.

By exploring the role of the hero, we can see one of the defining qualities of genre fiction: the integration of narrative structure into the narrative itself. In the next post, I’ll show how a similar process took place in the emergence of the detective story as a distinct genre.