Imagine you read Kant. You may disagree with him, you may be bored by his style, but you will persevere, for after all, he has important things to say. Now imagine any narrative fiction: You read a novel, watch a movie or TV series, or read a comic. It has something important to say, yet if you’re bored, you will probably close the book or switch off whatever device you’re using. This makes narrative fiction different from other texts. It is not that narrative fiction is not interested in truth. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum will tell you that novels explore complex ethical situations better than philosophical treatises. But they will not do so at the expense of their first aim, which is keeping readers engaged.
Evil is constitutive of the kind of ethical situations Nussbaum considers, and, like narrative, it keeps us hooked. We’re fascinated by evil, and so evil is perfect for narrative fiction and engagement. In narrative, evil comes in all shapes: the evil of Elizabeth’s younger sister in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is very different from the evil of count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel or that of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.
To meet this variety, we can approach evil in different ways: At one end of the spectrum, we can read narratives with an intuitive understanding of evil in mind and let evil emerge spontaneously from what we observe in the narrative. At the other end of the spectrum, we can collect models of evil from different disciplines and approach narratives by trying to match them to models.
If we follow the latter approach, we will find that different periods require different evils. We moderns, for example, distinguish between natural evil and moral evil. Natural evil is an external evil that hits us; moral evil is an internal evil we commit. Modern individuals keep the two evils separate: The strong wind that blew down my garden fence a few months ago is indifferent to any evil I may have previously done. Premodern evil, however, connects natural and moral evil: If I suffer (natural) evil, this is the punishment for the (moral) evil I did in the past. The anonymous sixth-century Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf would agree. It features a terrible monster, Grendel, who is cursed as kin of Cain (the first murderer of the Bible). The text tells us that Grendel suffers from that curse as if it blew him down like my garden fence. Yet at the same time, being kin of Cain, Grendel participates in Cain’s evil in a very real sense. As kin of Cain, Grendel suffers because he is to blame.
Most of us read modern rather than medieval texts. These invite different approaches to evil. Many are unrelated to evil and come from standard evolutionary cognition and psychology. After all, narratives are populated with fictional characters with personalities, intentions, and motivations, the very stuff of psychology. Their evil often emerges from human needs which are positively good and make us the species we are. Many models drawn from psychology, like the five-factor model, Riemann’s theory of anxiety, or Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, build on legitimate human desires. What, for example, can be evil about standard human motivations such as surviving, looking for a lifelong partner, or caring for our offspring and friends?
However, while these and other needs are in themselves positive, we need intelligence to identify the appropriate context where we can satisfy legitimate needs, and we need a capacity for restraint where the context is inappropriate. Letting wind is good, but you wouldn’t do that in front of the King of Spain. In “The Terrapin,” a short story by Patricia Highsmith, a single mother lacks context, intelligence, and capacity for restraint. She treats her eleven-year-old son as if he was five yet also approaches him erotically. Hidden within the story is a woman abandoned by her husband who tries to limit the freedom of her ex-husband and tries to mate with him, both after the fact, both by proxy, both through her son. Mating strategies are surely good, but do not mate when the context requires that you should be a parent. That’s evil.
There are, on the other hand, models from personality studies which explicitly address evil. The most famous is the dark triad, which distributes evil into three personality types: the Machiavellian, the psychopath, and the narcissist. All of them display a worrying lack of empathy towards others, but each does so in a different way: Machiavellians manipulate others, psychopaths follow their desires regardless of others, and narcissists expect undue recognition from others. It is interesting how these types are exaggerated versions of legitimate individual needs (see above) but run amok. Add to this serial killing and a penchant for torture, and you will be close to many of the most abject evils. And yet, the more extreme these evils, the closer they sail to mental illness and thus to mental health. In such cases, we can ask whether we are still talking about evil. In fact, the mother of “The Terrapin” may well exhibit a potent mix of the three dark personality traits. How evil is she then?
But just as narratives can borrow models of evil from other disciplines, they also impose their own rules on evil, for example, in the way they handle motivations. In normal life, individuals do things for reasons. In narrative fictions, characters only do things for reasons if texts suggest reasons. In this, fictional characters are less like real people and more like constructs. This can have repercussions for evil: A lack of motivation can render fictional characters less human and more mysterious, disturbing, and…evil. Slasher movies and psychological thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs (1991) exploit this lack.
Since narratives seek to engage and evil is engaging, narratives love evil. Some evils, however, are not engaging, and so narratives shun them. Take the assembly-line evil of the mass extermination camps. In this version of evil, killing in the gas chamber is broken down into a series of individually harmless actions: leading the victims to the trains, taking them from the train to the camp, telling them to get undressed, showing them the way to the gas chamber, etc. By thus diluting responsibility and evil to a minimum, mass evil turns into mechanic, bureaucratic behaviour. Such evil is very real, but finds it difficult to engage readers, since it risks being boring. Novels like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), set in Dachau, or series like Generation War (2013), which tries to show World War II from the perspective of the Germans, do not engage with the bureaucratic aspect of extermination, partly because that may well be boring. Did I say boring? Somehow, we’re back to Kant.
Daniel Candel Bormann
Daniel Candel Bormann is professor of literature at the Universidad de Alcalá and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University in 2016. He is interested in narrative studies and evil in narrative fiction, among many other things. His last book is Cognitive Narrative Thematics: A Book About What Books Are About (Routledge, 2024).
