Detestable characters

While I am sure we all know plenty of terrible people in our real lives, I will be sticking to literature in this post.

There are no end of terrible villains and semi-villains in literature, particularly in the fantasy vein and/or in children's stories.  It is a bit less common in literary fiction as one moves from, say, the Victorian era (where Dickens had quite a few outright villains) to more contemporary fiction where almost everyone has a valid point of view (or at least a convincing story to justify their actions) and thus outright villains are fewer.  Now I am not talking of genre fiction, where there remain many villains.  I guess one of the few villains I can think of in high literature (aside from David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas where he is drawing heavily on pulp conventions) is the Indira Gandhi stand-in in Rushdie's Midnight's Children.  I'm sure I'm forgetting dozens, but mostly the contemporary fiction I read has more nuanced antagonists.

Then there is a subset of characters who are generally unpleasant and perhaps even monstrous in some ways (to their children perhaps) but whom we probably wouldn't call villains.  I'd definitely classify many of the mother figures in Molly Keane's work under this category.  In some ways it can be tougher to read about these figures, as it is never entirely clear what they are up to.  Are they blocking the protagonist out of spite, or is it more of a positional thing where they and the protagonist are both after the same goal (job, house, treasure map ;) etc.)?  If it is really just positioning of two characters with different motivations, and thus it is nothing personal and this character may even change alliances and allegiances over the course of the story.  What can be somewhat unsatisfying in high literature is the fact that unlikeable or indeed truly detestable characters so rarely get their comeuppance, just as they so rarely do in real life.  It is only in fantasy where the villain is defeated (or double-dealers unmasked), though even here with the rise of multi-volume series, the longed-for triumph of the hero (i.e. gratification for the reader) can be extremely delayed.

There is a much larger group of unpleasant (or just socially awkward) characters, even main characters, whom one probably would want to avoid but that I would certainly not classify as villains.  For me, this includes Ignatius J. Reilly from Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and Ed from Vandergaeghe's My Present Age, whose similarities I discuss a bit here.  I found Spark's Miss Jean Brodie pretty unpleasant as well.  Obviously, it would be incredibly boring if one only read fiction about morally upright people with whom one would get along.  A few books like that are acceptable (most of Barbara Pym for instance) but literature largely does require some conflict, unless it is totally internal conflict (I found myself far more interested than I expected in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which is almost entirely about a decent preacher who struggles to be an even better man).  So I don't think we'll ever see the end of the unpleasant or unlikable core characters, and this is particularly true on stage where subtlety and interior motivations don't work well at all, and conflict must be externalized.

What I do find intriguing is the rise of the morally ambiguous main character where some readers will go along for the ride and others will be turned off right away and probably will put down the book in disgust.  While I assume there are some sprinkled throughout history (and certainly one can find caddish individuals justifying their behaviour in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to say nothing of Milton's Paradise Lost or most of Shakespeare's silver-tongued evil-doers), these are usually somewhat secondary characters or figures who are clearly not to be emulated.  I suspect that the first roguish character we are meant to have some sympathy for is Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair.  Some people find her assertiveness quite reasonable in light of her circumstances, and there is certainly a thread of pushy, relatively unaccommodating, unapologetic women that leads right to Muriel Spark.  I have to admit, while I am looking forward to reading Vanity Fair (after all these years of lugging it around), I probably shouldn't write any more on it until I finally have this under my belt.  In any case, do not hesitate to point out if Becky Sharp isn't the turning point I have made her out to be.

I am thinking about this because I have just finished James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which features one of the most detestable main characters (Robert Wringhim) I have ever come across.  I so wanted him to have his ass handed to him when he kept following his older brother around and interfering with various games of sport and so forth.  He intentionally tries to get himself beaten so that he can have his older brother thrown in jail.  (Sort of like one of the scenes in Fight Club.*)  What gives the book a bit of extra frisson is that so much of the justification comes from the doctrine of predestination, surely one of the most twisted religious doctrines that ever existed, namely that a very tiny number of individuals have been written down in a book in Heaven that guarantees they are the sheep to be saved on Judgement Day (and God knowing all will only have put them in this book if their actions are all aligned with His commands) but the vast majority of humanity are goats that will be doomed not matter what they do.  There is an interesting slice of theology (only lightly explored here) that good works are meaningless if one does them in the hopes of gaining entrance to Heaven, since that in effect turns them into selfish works.  While most adherents of predestination were perfectly moral (if highly priggish) individuals, a small number did commit various crimes, knowing that they would still get into Heaven no matter what.  Well, Wringhim is one of the very bad sheep.  I won't go into any great detail, but his crimes are many and great.

What I didn't care for was that in the second half, it becomes far more Gothic, as it turns out that the Devil himself is accompanying Wringhim and leading him astray.  I basically lost interest at this point, simply because the Devil (here called Gil-Martin) could do anything -- change his features, switch Wringhim's clothing, put Wringhim into a trance for six months and commit more crimes in the guise of Wringhim, etc.  It's just boring -- far more boring than a supernatural creature with at least some limits.**  It reminds me of the ending of the 1998 movie Fallen (with Denzel Washington) which I thought was an unbelievable cop out, though I thought that whole movie was pretty silly.  There are certainly some attempts to read the whole Gil-Martin thing as Wringhim externalizing his crimes, but in the first part of the book two other observers see Wringhim with the supernatural being, so I don't think Hogg means anything other than Wringhim was literally going around with the Devil or some powerful demon by his side.

I'll come back around if any other character is as upsetting as Wringhim, but so far he wins the sweepstakes as the most detestable main character in a novel.  (It's quite probable that the narrator of Ellis's American Psycho would be even worse, but I have no intention of ever reading that novel or watching the movie.)

Edit: After a bit of reflection, I decided that the narrator of Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is another fairly unpleasant chap, but top honours goes to the narrator of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, who like Robert Wringhim becomes pretty blood-thirsty along the way and yet always finds a way to justify his crimes.  Perhaps he is even worse, since he doesn't even have the excuse that the Devil was by his side, urging him on.  It was all down to his desperation to escape crushing poverty.  So if one actually is looking for detestable characters to loathe, then The White Tiger is definitely worth checking out (and is eminently more readable than Justified Sinner, which drags in many places).  Still, any other suggestions are more than welcome.
 
* Apparently, I am not the first one to link Fight Club to Hogg through its immediate successor Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  See Stirling, K. (2004). "Dr Jekyll and Mr Jackass": Fight Club as a Refraction of Hogg's Justified Sinner and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Postmodern Studies, 35(1), 83-94.

 ** I guess it is an open question why I don't let the same sort of thing bother me in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, but the shenanigans the Devil gets up to in Moscow are only part of that book, not the entire motivating force of the novel, as it is here in Hogg's Justified Sinner.