Question...

[concertigrossi]

I could bore you with the details of my trials and travails of the last three months, but I can't stomach the rehash. I can't even make the oft-broken promise that I'll post more often. Let's just say it's been a growth opportunity and leave it at that.

But I've got a question:

What are some good literary examples of a three-dimensional racist/sexist/homophobic/anti-semitic character?

Because that's quite a trick, these days, right? I just read "The Help," and the main antagonist is an almost cartoonish caricature. All she lacks is a Snidely Whiplash mustache. But, while there certainly are Snidely Whiplashes in the world, they couldn't have driven the Holocaust or the Jim Crow laws without the support of the majority of ordinary people.

How do you accurately portray the banality of evil?

Comments

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Isn't this why Lolita was so acclaimed? Because the protagonist is utterly evil, and Nabokov tries to get you to sympathize with him?

Another example, maybe closer to what you want, is Toni Morrison's A Mercy. As I remember, it shows the evolution of slavery into a racist institution.

I might have other ideas as I muddle along here.

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

I'll check out that Toni Morrison. You're absolutely right, Lolita would be the ultimate example.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Well, Hamlet is a raging misogynist.

Faulkner is full of horrible people. But his books seem to actively resist sympathy in all of its forms. I think you can only write horrible characters well if you're not invested in the kind of reading experience that involves sympathizing and identifying. Or...I dunno. Maybe that's wrong. The guy in _L'Etranger_ is a pretty big jerk and people still seem to identify with him, even if I can't.

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Good point. No, I think you're right - and I definitely read to sympathize and identify. One thing that Faulkner, _Lolita_ and most of Camus have in common is that I can't stand any of them.

And you do get misaimed fandoms everywhere. Lolita, for example, or those guys who thank Roger Waters for telling the truth about women in "The Wall."

[stasia]

Dolores Umbridge. Banal and yet incredibly evil.

I don't know that she's exactly three-dimensional, but she's a very chilling example of the Banal Evil. Admittedly, we aren't supposed to sympathise with her, but I hear her language, her narrow-minded beliefs from people currently running for office.

Stasia

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

That's the thing - I don't want anyone to sympathize with the character. Lately, on his blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates has had some very good discussions about racism and how it's portrayed, particularly how the racist characters tend to be wholly and totally evil. And that's a definite improvement - the mass culture has decided that Racism is Bad, and I have no argument there.

The problem is that people are then able to compartmentalize. Racists are trashy people like Bull Connor, so the viewer/reader can say, "Well, I'm not like THAT, so I'm not a racist." If they're not out lynching people or campaigning for segregation, then they're ok, no matter what else they believe. And then trying to get them to examine their beliefs hits a brick wall, because OMG YOU JUST ACCUSED THEM OF CROSS BURNING.

[soubie.livejournal.com]

The problem is that people are then able to compartmentalize. Racists are trashy people like Bull Connor, so the viewer/reader can say, "Well, I'm not like THAT, so I'm not a racist." If they're not out lynching people or campaigning for segregation, then they're ok, no matter what else they believe. And then trying to get them to examine their beliefs hits a brick wall, because OMG YOU JUST ACCUSED THEM OF CROSS BURNING.


My god, yes. The number of times I have heard someone go nuts about the suggestion that they were bullying or deriding someone on account of their race, where they took the attitude that, because their cruelty was supposedly colour-blind it was fine.... (that's not quite what you said but I think it logicially follows.)

My uncle also has a habit of claiming that whenever a non-white employee is dissatisfied then they instantly pull the 'race card'- the last time he said this he mimed showing a card, just in case we didn't get what he meant.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

One further thought: part of the problem is that literature has a bias toward reflective characters, because it's easier to depict their inner lives if they have some kind of self-awareness. And it's precisely that *lack* of reflection that makes the kind of banal evil Arendt was talking about possible. I don't remember the book very well at all, but from my dim recollection, Eichmann was able to do what he did because he didn't really *think*, he just sort of...behaved and reacted. And the unexamined life is not only much more likely to be evil, but also really hard to write about, except from the position of an observer.

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

True. And writers tend to be very reflective people, at least the ones who've gotten beyond the Mary Sue stage...

[soubie.livejournal.com]

I suppose it wouldn't count where you're looking at works where the writer was, by our standards, a bigot, but nobody who knew him would have considered him such? 'Cos a lot of literature from the last 200 years comes from offensive assumptions, although they're usually under the surface (check out the original Holmes novels, Rudyard Kipling, etc.)

I suppose Zadie Smith's White Teeth is full of well-rounded, intelligent characters who are full of prejudices. They're frequently the prejudice of, say, Muslims against Christians, or Jamiacan Brits against whites, etc., which muddies the waters a little, and come a lot from the perspective of minorities rather than majorities, but it more or less fulfills what you were saying.