I was reading an essay this morning where the author made reference to "evil" being present, in a place where there should be no evil. Which, of course, got me thinking about how often writers use evil to describe their antagonists.
It seems, that in the crime genre especially, writers tend to drop every bad thing that happens into the lap of evil, the man was evil, the house was evil, the spouse was evil, the neighbors were evil. If you read the book jackets, many times you'll run across the phase, "classic good vs evil story" or words to that effect.
I remember reading an article once that said a writer shouldn't label every bad thing as evil, by doing that, the writer was taking the easy way out. By tagging your antagonist as evil, you don't have to dig into his mind to see why he does what he does, he's simply evil. This struck me at the time because I've always believed that every human being has the capacity to do bad things, either from want or need and to simply say that "the devil made me do it" tends to be nothing more than a cop-out, a way to avoid putting a human stamp on the dark deeds and thoughts that are totally human.
So, what do you think? Should crime writers, or any writer for that matter, dig deeper than good vs evil when they're writing, or would readers be repulsed reading a story where someone did something utterly unthinkable just because they felt the need to act on an impulse? And I'm not referring to someone who's insane or psychotic or bi-polar here, I'm talking about a normal human being who goes about the everyday chores of living, then one day is forced to make the decision to act on those dark impulses that live in the back of everyone's mind.
The floor is open.
6 comments:
Well, I'm a big Highsmith and Vine fan so I say ...bring it on!
Yes, Highsmith is very scarey without even touching on what might be called evil. I was thinking about Stephen King, also, but even beneath the human faults his stories have, there's a stream of evil that runs under the surface to blame for what goes wrong in the story. I'm thinking Pet Cemetery here.
I think people make conscience decisions to do right or wrong, but in stories, some authors want to be able to place the blame on some outside force that compels people to act as they do. Does that make any sense?
Because my husband is my first reader and he hates to be told rather than shown, I seldom label any action. Figure the reader knows for him/herself. A terrfic piece on Highsmith in the New York Literary Supplement. Those book jackets are written by editors who think we need to know what we're in for, I think,
You're probably right about the book jackets, Patti. I was also thinking that making excuses for behavior is more in relationship to novels than shorts. In shorts we can accept a person being totally off the charts in their behavior but in novels we have a need to explain why the antagonist is behaving in that manner.
Hmmmm....I don't set out to make my characters intentionally evil, but more like a person in a day to day situations who find himself/herself finally fed up with a certain action and acts accordingly.
Or has an underlying short fuse as flaw (much like myself).
I think people normally commit crimes out of frustration or anger (the short fuse)or just plain stupidity. That's why I wonder why the need to tag these actions as evil instead of just human nature. Of course, by tagging it as evil, we permit ourselves to believe that we couldn't commit these vile things that we read about or see others do.
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