Opacity (4 of 6)

The novel and the ancient epic stand at two extremes of a process. My reading in the intervening millennia is limited, but it seems clear at least that the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare represent intermediary stages. No doubt there are many others.

Richard III and Iago and Macbeth are evil, to be sure; but their evil is different from that of the villains of novels. The most obvious difference is its unapologetic quality. The novel, at its heart (and the exceptions only prove the rule), wishes to understand its characters, to see inside them, to make them transparent, their inner workings clear. So the wicked person must justify himself in terms the reader can understand, even in some sense relate to; he must be wounded into evil, or evil through pride, through jealousy, through some moral failing that we all can recognize. What is so interesting is that this does not make him more innocent but rather guiltier, for it is as if the act of judgment has infiltrated the one to be judged. No judge is required; the moral order need not be restored, because it was never upset; the sinner was punished before he began; to sin itself is already to be punished. There is not the action and then the judgment, but the action emerges already judged. There is no possibility of innocence here—only of a suspended sentence, on the grounds that everyone is guilty, that we, in the villains shoes, could have been just as bad. By comparison, Richard III has still a great element of innocence in him, a quality of simply doing what it is his inevitable nature to do.

Macbeth (whose play is written later) is more “full of the milk of human kindness” and precisely this makes him more guilty, more of a modern villain. The very foretelling of his future glory fills him with fear, as if he senses in himself a deadly ambition waiting to spring forth, an ambition he is already able enough to judge. But this fear and this kindness are still something quite different from the reflective self-justification that we would find in a novel. There is no psychological exposition—no hints of old resentment, overbearing parents, some suffering that he wants to avenge. Where does his violent ambition come from? We do not know and we do not ask. He hears the witches’ prophecy, fear comes over him, his wife urges him to act, and he acts. Whatever else there is to say about it must be said afterwards, later, by those who watch—not by those who, in the world of the play, committed the crimes.

Were we to meet such villains as these in a novel—whose psychology is opaque, whose sins seem unmotivated—we would find him flat, unconvincing, blatant plot devices. We would feel that the novelist had not done her job: had not filled her work with beings whom we can recognize as human— that is, recognize as in some sense like ourselves—; had not penetrated the psychological realm that is the proper domain and responsibility of her art.  And yet, in these earlier works— in Shakespeare, in ancient epics—the very same opacity that, in a novel, would render characters lifeless, here on the contrary endows them with the solidity and mysterious immediacy that, in its own very different but very vivid way, brings them to life.