Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort [1° ed.] 0367441462, 9780367441463

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Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel

Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort sits at the intersection of Literary Studies and ­Masculinities Studies, arguing that the villain in many works of contemporary ­British fiction is a patriarchal figure that embodies an excess of patriarchal power which needs to be controlled by the hero. The villains’ stories are enactments of empowerment fantasies and cautionary tales against ­abusing patriarchal power. While providing readers with in-depth ­studies of some of the most popular contemporary fiction villains, Sara Martín shows how current representations of the villain are not only measured against previous literary characters but also against the real-life figure of the arch-villain Adolf Hitler. Dr. Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

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Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel From Hitler to Voldemort

Sara Martín

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Sara Martín to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-44146-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00795-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To all the men proving every day that there are alternatives to patriarchy

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Defining the Patriarchal Villain 1 1 Adolf Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy 18 2 Big Brother and O’Brien: The Mystique of Power and the Reproduction of Patriarchal Masculinity 42 3 Morgoth and Sauron: The Problem of Recurring Villainy 61 4 Steerpike: Gormenghast’s Angry Young Man 85 5 Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Larger than Life: The Villain in the James Bond Series 105 6 Richard Onslow Roper and the ‘Labyrinth of Monstrosities’: John le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains 129 7 Michael Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy: Democracy at Risk 153 8 Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss: The Constant Struggle to Retain Power 177 9 Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic: Self-empowerment as Self-destruction 202 Conclusions 227 Index

233

Acknowledgments

My interest in villainy stretches back to my doctoral dissertation (1996), which focused on monstrosity and already had a chapter dealing with the moral monster. The ideas behind this book connect, however, more closely with the seminar ‘Representations of Heroism and Villainy’, which I taught between 2006–07 and 2016–17 in the MA in Literary Theory and Cultural Studies of the Universitat Autònoma de ­Barcelona, where I work. My thanks, then, to the MA Coordinator, Antonio Penedo, and to the students for having allowed me to develop my main arguments and to keep the conversation flowing for ten years. I would like to thank, above all, my editor at Routledge, Jennifer ­Abbott, for believing in my project and for her constant encouragement. Xavier Aldana Reyes and Antonio Ballesteros González also deserve my thanks for backing my proposal unconditionally, as well for pointing out where it needed to be reinforced. I am most grateful as well to the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística of the UAB for allowing me to re-organize my ­teaching and free one year for the writing of the book—an amazing luxury, i­ndeed. I thank particularly my colleagues, and wonderful friends, F ­ elicity Hand, Esther Pujolràs, and Isabel Santaulària for always being there for me and for all their support. Among my family, my thanks go very specially to my sister-in-law Elena, for always asking about my progress. And, as usual, to Gonzalo, for his company, support, and love.

Introduction Defining the Patriarchal Villain

A Gendered, Patriarchal Fantasy of Empowerment John Mortimer, editor of The Oxford Book of Villains, declares in his ‘Introduction’ that ‘The difficulties of preparing a book of villains is that the field stretches towards infinity’ (vii). This proliferation and the ­assumption that the villain is a sufficiently understood character, ­requiring no further exploration apart from some exceptional cases, are major ­obstacles to embark on new research. It is therefore indispensable to limit the corpus, unless one wishes to produce an encyclopaedia of ­villainy—an academic Villains’ Wiki1—or yet another rogues gallery in the style of many illustrated volumes addressed to a general ­readership. 2 It is also essential to examine villainy from a new research p ­ erspective that questions evil and reads the villain as a gendered construct m ­ otivated by patriarchal interests. The villain remains vastly undertheorized in comparison to the hero. Here I consider the construction of the current, post-WWII, male ­villain by making several overlapping choices that, I grant, might be ­controversial. To begin with, instead of focusing on film and television, as most immediate predecessors have done, 3 I have limited my corpus to the printed word (novels but also a biography). Second, going against the current practice in the study of villainy, which prioritizes A ­ merican audio-­visual productions, I concentrate on British culture on the grounds that the modern villain is a construction generated by English Literature from Shakespeare onward but also because a new national approach is required. There are precise reasons why Lord Voldemort is British, ­instead of American, and these should be examined. My analysis of villainy defends the thesis that the rise of Adolf Hitler and the threat of invasion which Britain faced during WWII (1939–1945) have conditioned the construction of the British villain, as J.K. Rowling clearly shows with Voldemort’s obsession for blood purity.4 Obviously, Hitler has been likewise a major influence on the American view of ­villainy since the early 1930s, when he came to power, and continues to be a problematic source of inspiration (see Butter). However, Hitler’s material, real-life existence impacted Britain much more directly. This is the reason why I have devoted most of Chapter 1 to analysing the

2  Defining the Patriarchal Villain extensive two-volume biography by English historian Ian Kershaw, ­Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (1998) and Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (2000). Kershaw’s impressive work allows me to consider not only how Hitler is understood today from a British point of view but also how the Nazi tyrant has been read before our time in this and other national contexts. It is my contention that Hitler has been approached with great confusion, using codes that belong to the literary rather than the real-life villain; at the same time, Hitler’s extreme villainy still provides us today with a measuring rod for any subsequent fictional construction of the villain. Hubris was published only one year after Rowling’s first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), and this ­chronological proximity must be read as a sign of their sharing the same zeitgeist. This is built on the perception that even though Hitler’s villainous r­ egime marks a watershed in human History its excesses might be repeated ­because the lesson which should have been learned from Nazism has not really been absorbed. The work I present here is part of my ongoing research within, using Jeff Hearn’s nomenclature, 5 Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities, though I would prefer to introduce a new label: Anti-Patriarchal Studies. Most studies approach villainy from a stance that emphasizes evil using religious, moral, ethical, or philosophical perspectives. These, however, as happens with the psychological approach, miss the elephant in the room: the villain is habitually a man, thus a gendered construction within patriarchy. I argue here, consequently, that power, rather than evil, is the central concept in the villain’s characterization and narrative arc, which corresponds to patriarchy’s strategies for constant renewal. The villain is the protagonist of a cautionary tale6: any man who ­deliberately abuses the amount of power that patriarchy allows him to enjoy (depending on his social and personal position) will be punished and even eliminated by the hero, whose function is to restore the status quo. The manifest attraction of the villain lies in his daring to accumulate as much power as possible against all injunctions, which is why he has been celebrated as a fantasy of empowerment even by individuals who are by no means empowered (in fact, most of us). In my reading hero and villain are part of a noxious patriarchal narrative which insists on foregrounding power as a desirable possession, while it hypocritically condemns its excessive accumulation, simultaneously making false promises of empowerment to those who are not privileged members of patriarchy’s hegemonic circles. As I maintain here, villainy does not spring from evil or any general fault in human nature but from an unbounded sense of entitlement to patriarchal power, acted out by individuals who feel no fear of retribution. So far, these persons have been mostly male, hence my focus on villainous men, but this may change in the future depending on how far access to patriarchal power is extended to women.

Defining the Patriarchal Villain  3

The Villain as Fictional Construct: Two Lines of Descent The noun ‘villain’ refers to a character in fiction (in all its varieties), though it may also refer to any real-life person accountable for inflicting injury or destruction. Hitler and Stalin are villains who, unfortunately for their victims, were actual human beings rather than mere fictional characters. In Britain ‘villain’ is also often used loosely as a synonym for a ‘criminal’ of any class. An etymological peculiarity is that ‘villain’ descends from Old French villein, the person connected with a farm (Latin villa). A ‘villain’, then, is originally a low-class, rustic individual, even though most fictional villains are upper class (or aspire to joining that class). In his seminal Discipline and Punish Foucault attributes this radical change to the transition from a cruel system of public punishment centred on the body to a late 18th-century system of penal justice, focused on the soul and on imprisonment aimed at re-education. The ‘rustic malefactor’ (69), the ‘man of the people’ (69) often glorified in 18thcentury broadsheets, was found to be ‘too simple to be the protagonist of subtle truths’ (69) in this new scheme. He was, accordingly, replaced by the upper-class villain in Gothic fiction and in the new early 19thcentury crime novel. The villain is mainly a secondary character, even when he lends his name to the story: Count Dracula, for instance, appears in surprisingly few scenes of Stoker’s eponymous novel (1897). Plotwise, the villain— as Gwen Hyman claims about Anne Brontë’s Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)—is ‘the central mover in the text’ since ‘his uncontrolled conduct and inability or unwillingness to reform provide the narrative action’ (57). Since villains are, mainly, embodiments of this narrative function they need not be given solid personalities. Brontë provides Huntingdon with a sophisticated characterization, but this is lacking in lesser villains (like those common, for example, in ­action films). As Juliet John observes, the villain is ‘unrealistic’ and even ‘pre-realistic’ (10), for he ‘derives from an allegorical tradition rooted, in British culture, in Christianity’, the one that produced the Devil and Vice in the Medieval morality plays. For John, these origins might justify ‘the extreme neglect of the type as a subject for literary criticism’ (10), since conventional character analysis ‘prioritizes the hidden over the ostensible, the ambiguous over the absolute, the complex over the simple’ (10). John, a pioneer in the study of the Dickensian villain, is perfectly aware that quite often villains are fully fledged individuals rather than just a basic instance of the archetype (Fagin is a relevant example). However, she is right to contend that the critical disregard of the villain connects with the scholarly preference for complex characterization. Arguably, exceptional villains, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, obscure with their very singularity the patterns present in the ubiquitous category of the villain as a fictional construction.

4  Defining the Patriarchal Villain The 18th- and 19th-century villain of popular stage melodrama,7 ­inherited by silent cinema, was designed to be the object of ‘the very purest, unequivocal kind of hatred, repulsion or disdain’ (Singer 40). He existed to be hissed at, and for the audience ‘there was no more urgent gratification than to see him extinguished’ (41). Stage melodrama was imported into England from France. There the German bourgeois variety was transformed by the revolutionary impulse of the 1790s, which partly explains why playwrights ‘demonised aristocrats as villains’ (Singer 163). There was a sociopolitical subtext in the basic pleasure of doing away with the privileged man abusing his power, after seeing him on stage terrorizing the innocent heroine. The experience required ‘emotional excess in the villain’s expressions of hatred, envy, jealousy, spite or malice’ (131), which generated the ‘codified modes of histrionic “overacting”’ (131) transferred to early silent cinema.8 There was no call for a nuanced characterization, though Victorian actors understood very well the difference between playing Iago in Othello and the villain in a popular play by Dion Boucicault. I have no room here to trace the full history of the villain but, as the brief allusion to melodrama shows, two parallel trends can be identified. On the one hand, there is a more or less recognizable literary line of descent which begins with the merger of the villainous Vice (and Herod) of the late Medieval morality play and the new Renaissance Machiavellian villain; this fusion produces the Elizabethan villain-hero, a figure mightily enhanced by Shakespeare and other contemporaries like John Webster. This literary line passes through Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost (1667), reaches the better Gothic novelists (particularly Ann Radcliffe) and the Romantic poets (specially Lord Byron), to be next inherited by many first-rank Victorian novelists, such as the Brontë sisters. Emily’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847) is an ambiguous hero-­villain and so is Rochester in her sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847). The four main Gothic texts of the 19th century—Frankenstein (1818), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Dracula (1897)—together with the novels by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins significantly contributed to the development of the villain in this literary line of descent. The second, parallel line begins with ‘the criminal biography and the criminal broadsheet, which dominated eighteenth-century print culture’ (Schramm 12), and, once in the 19th century, links together the penny dreadful, the lesser Gothic fiction, and stage melodrama (both Romantic and Victorian). This other line of descent connects as well with American early silent cinema, as I have noted, and with the dime novel from which pulp fiction descends. The villain of this second non-literary l­ineage is far less known, though it is crucial to understand that this is the kind of villainy which transitioned to later spoken Hollywood films, TV series and movies, comics, and videogames. As Clive Bloom writes, the

Defining the Patriarchal Villain  5 ‘invisible’ writers behind the passage from 19th-century popular stage and print fiction to the 20th-century audio-visual panorama acted ‘as an aesthetic link’ connecting ‘readers sophisticated in the media of film and television and perhaps only merely competent in the realm of the written’ (24) with the proficient consumers of creative Literature. An exploration of this cross-pollination, in which the villain occupies a prominent position, is still missing in current research.

Characterizing the Villain: The Problem of Evil Fredric Jameson indirectly describes the villain in The Political Unconscious when he clarifies that Philippe, a character in Balzac’s The Black Sheep (1842), ‘is not a villain in the twin sense of reinforcing our essentially ideological conception of evil on the one hand, and of “explaining” the social existence of disorder on the other’ as ‘some ethical or mythic force’ (158), but just a man down on his luck and raging for it. In a very different type of volume, The Bad Guys: A Pictorial History of the Movie Villain, Everton observes that ‘The activities of the bad guys tell us far more about the changing mores and morals of our times than a similar study of the good guys could ever do’ (xi). The villain is, then, a fictional index to how the notion of evil, the fear of social chaos, and the system of moral and legal judgement evolve in time and, as such, a central cultural element. Villainy is certainly perceived in different ways at different times. Clarence Boyer specifies in his pioneering classic The Villain as Hero in Elizabethan Tragedy (1914) that ‘a villain is a man who, for a selfish end, wilfully and deliberately violates standards of morality sanctioned by the audience or ordinary reader’ (27, my italics). The keyword here is morality, implicitly dominated by religion. For Gil Calvo, the villain is neither a moral monster nor mentally ill but an individual who breaks all rules because he remains indifferent to negative opinion and to punishment: he only listens to his ‘own daimon or interior genius (as Agamben called it)’ (11, my translation). Absolute selfishness and total solipsism are highlighted here as key factors. In Mike Alsford’s Heroes and V ­ illains the villain is mainly defined by his sociopathic and psychopathic lack of empathy, which is why he ‘uses the world and the people in it from a distance, as pure resource’ (121). Alsford eschews, like Gil Calvo, the idea of the ‘beast within’ (140) and describes both ‘heroism and villainy as ways of being in the world rather than as having to do with innate abilities or powers’ (140), or with external moral judgement. Anyone, he claims, can ‘become heroic or villainous’ and no individuals are ‘heroes and villains all the time’ (140) but only in the context of definite actions. Typically, the villain terrorizes his victims into complying with his plans to accrue power, often eliciting some basic admiration despite the cruelty of his methods. The villain’s might and capacity to instil fear

6  Defining the Patriarchal Villain could explain his paradoxical attractive for, as Edmund Burke argued in his 1757 study of the sublime, Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (33) Burke further indicates that ‘I know of nothing sublime, which is not some modification of power’ (53). The villain exploits the glamour associated to powerful men by constant patriarchal indoctrination to reinforce his position as the hero’s valid contender, though he must always strike a careful balance, since ‘a villain without doubts, without even a reversed or perversed morality, is tiresome’ (Schelde 158). The villain must be, in short, both profoundly human and abjectly inhuman. The handbooks addressed to writers, particularly screenwriters, reduce the abstractions of the debate about morality, evil, and villainy down to managing a set of features for characterization. Jessica Morrell’s Bullies, Bastards and Bitches: How to Write the Bad Guys of Fiction has a specific chapter devoted to villainy (‘Bad to the Bones: Villains’) in which she considers the villain as a separate subcategory of the ‘bad guy’, odd as this may sound. Villains, she declares, are wicked and obsessive but must also be highly intelligent; their carefully laid plans are always thwarted by the hero, but he must struggle to dismantle them. Villains are narcissistic but hardly ever lone operators (unlike classic psychopaths of the Norman Bates variety). Instead, they surround themselves with minions or henchmen controlled ‘by using guilt and loyalty’ (126), though this also means that villains often fret about betrayal by their lieutenants. Villains, Morrell concludes, should be ‘riveting’ for their ‘charisma, depth and motivation’ (128), just as heroes are. This should not be surprising since both share similar values conditioned by how patriarchal masculinity is idealized. Morrell, like most commentators approaching the villain, highlights evil ‘as the source code of writing a villain’ (119). Given the nature of her volume, she can be excused for not looking into the patriarchal framework that conditions current ideas of evil—others cannot. Men and women participate in intellectual debates hinging on a too easily accepted assumption that evil is generically human, despite the overwhelming evidence that most evil acts are caused specifically by patriarchal men. Parkin, for instance, explains that ‘Humans often kill, maim and ill-treat each other, but sometimes they engage in such wanton destructiveness and cruelty they appear to observers to have exceeded definable bounds of humanity. They are thus monsters…’ (12, original ellipsis). Freud himself is also guilty of this generalization in Civilization

Defining the Patriarchal Villain  7 and Its Discontents, in which he extends villainy to all human beings by portraying Homo sapiens as naturally endowed with a great share of aggression. ‘Civilized society’, he worries, ‘is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another’ (86, my italics). The difference between this traditional approach and my own is that I do not use ‘men’ in the generic sense of universal human being. This does not mean that I am writing as an androphobic radical feminist,9 expressing a conviction that masculinity is the source of all villainy, whereas women occupy a high moral ground. Kekes writes that ‘Since there are people with sharp intellect and strong will who habitually choose to do evil, it is a mistake to suppose that evil must be due to some cognitive or volitional weakness that corrupts our essential goodness’ (131) and I do agree that some of these people are women, specifically those complicit with patriarchy. Morton complains that the ways in which we approach evil appeal to a kind of imaginative laziness in us. We prefer to understand evil in terms of archetypal horrors, fictional villains, and deep viciousness, rather than strain our capacities for intuitive understanding towards a grasp of the difficult truth that people much like us perform acts that we find unimaginably awful. (102, my italics) My view is that this ‘imaginative laziness’ extends to the ‘difficult truth’ that most of the ‘people like us’ are patriarchal men. When Mary Midgley says that ‘We have good reason to fear the understanding of evil, because understanding seems to involve some sort of identification’ (4), she is endorsing a strategy which is not only wrong but most dangerous. What I propose, contradicting Morton, is that we examine fictional villains as a highly appropriate clue to deconstruct abstract evil and that we investigate villainy as a set of material practices designed to ensure the excessive empowerment of particular patriarchal men, beyond what is acceptable among this hegemonic category. The challenge that must be faced when approaching villainy is not identifying with evil-doers (that can only happen if the onlooker is already inclined that way) but accepting that evil is a fuzzy construction created by patriarchy itself to obfuscate its victims and conceal the mechanics of the patriarchal entitlement to power.

The Villain: An Expression of Patriarchal Power The acceptance of evil as an actual force is so ingrained in current debates on morality that it is necessary to take a step back to stress that, like any other cultural feature, evil is an ideological construction. María Pía Lara, who defends a pragmatic post-metaphysical approach (as I

8  Defining the Patriarchal Villain do here), protests in Narrating Evil that we need to pay attention to distinctive cases, whether real or fictional,10 to produce what she calls ‘reflective judgements’ (9). She attacks postmodern intellectuals like Julia Kristeva, Jean-Françoise Lyotard, or Slavoj Žižek for their mistrust of representation and because they ‘conceive of evil as an absolute event of strangeness and monstrosity’ to ultimately ‘end up saying nothing meaningful about it’ (76). Yet, Lara herself still refers vaguely to ‘the human condition’ (14) without explaining why this is supposed to be universal and eternal. Terry Eagleton also sounds quite imprecise when he claims that evil is possibly ‘the only form of transcendence left in a postreligious world’ (65), and positively flippant, though ostensibly wellmeaning, when he declares that ‘Evil is boring because it is lifeless. Its seductive allure is purely superficial’ (123). In her overview of patriarchy, Pavla Miller notes that, as far as 20thcentury feminism is concerned, ‘Patriarchy meant different things to different feminist activists, and was employed in different—and sometimes incompatible—projects’ (54). To clarify my own feminist, anti-­patriarchal position, I will draw attention to the conceptual distance between Jean Baudrillard’s La Transparence du Mal and Leo Braudy’s From Chivalry to Terrorism. For the French philosopher, the main problem is that evil, including that causing terrorism, is everywhere, and so ‘l’anamorphose des formes contemporaines du Mal est infinie’ (88). In contrast, in his chapter ‘Parting Words: Terrorism as a Gender War’, Braudy discusses terrorism as intra-patriarchal confrontation: The United States and Europe, the villains in the fundamentalist equation, are also the places where over the last century the definition of masculinity has most separated from its military embodiment. Here is where the psychological attack especially comes into play, for the enemies of Western technological and cultural power are also the enemies of a Western idea of gender that has slowly but perceptibly over the last century changed from the assumption that male and female are polarities to the belief that they are a continuum. (547) The events of 9/11 should be read, Braudy argues, as a brutal reminder from ultra-patriarchal radicalized Muslim men to American moderately patriarchal men that their masculinity is being undermined by debilitating pro-feminist policies which they should resist. Like Braudy I maintain, therefore, that material patriarchal practices of empowerment (and not abstract evil) lie at the root of the villainous worldwide struggles for domination, past and present, which cause so much suffering among the disempowered victims. Human nature, as the concept is understood today, is a distortion of reality created to endorse patriarchal domination. Free from these

Defining the Patriarchal Villain  9 shackles, humankind would hopefully turn out to be very different, though I am not defending here an idyllic, alternative matriarchy, wary, as I am, of all forms of gender separatism or essentialism.11 Patriarchy, a system of social organization with a pyramidal, hierarchical, power-­ based structure, has so far given mostly men access to its higher echelons. Masculinity and patriarchy, however, do not completely overlap: many men resist patriarchal imposition (for instance, those who reject militarism), and many women are overtly or covertly patriarchal (for instance, those who behave ruthlessly in capitalist business concerns or endorse right-wing extremism). If, regardless of their gender, an individual supports the idea that social and personal life should be based on hierarchical principles determined by personal empowerment, then they are patriarchal. Patriarchy, nevertheless, operates on the basic Machiavellian principle of making itself naturalized through all kinds of institutions, to the point that we have assumed that it is the equivalent of human nature and that there is no alternative to it (except perhaps in some obscure tribes in marginal corners of the Earth). Evil is a patriarchal mechanism of control, not in the sense that we should all be free to do as we please but in the sense that by hypocritically fuelling the idea of evil while pretending to uphold justice, patriarchy rules by fear. The villain plays in this process the role of the bogeyman that scares us into submission. Plenty of the work done within Masculinities Studies is addressed at making it evident that ‘Not only do men oppress women, they also oppress other men’ (Brittan 17). Most crucially, ‘the demands made of men by the model and the discourse of patriarchal masculinity are as damaging as those made of women, but in different ways’ (Buchbinder 83). The discussion of how exactly hegemonic masculinity connects with patriarchy continues today, mainly focused on the tension between the public and the private. Hearn has argued that the private (or family) patriarchy of the past was progressively replaced in the 19th century by the ‘currently dominant’ public (or social) patriarchy (6). This means that individuals in current Western democratic countries enjoy a much greater degree of personal freedom than in the past though they are, nevertheless, still constantly beset by psychological and physical patriarchal violence from which the state, supposedly a guarantor of personal rights, fails to protect them. The current #MeToo campaign, started in October 2017, is proving that, despite the advances of feminism, women are subjected to much patriarchal harassment. This has been blamed incorrectly on so-called toxic masculinity, instead of, as it should, on patriarchal entitlement. ‘Men’s violence against women’, Michael Kimmel has written, ‘is the result of entitlement thwarted’ (268), yet, as he adds, ‘men’s violence against other men derives from the same thwarted sense of entitlement’ (268). The many cases of school and work ­bullying affecting men (also of sexual abuse) show that the situation  cannot

10  Defining the Patriarchal Villain be solved from essentialist, polarized positions that separate men and women as absolute binary categories. What is toxic and must be rooted out is the sense of entitlement to power behind all patriarchal behaviour, not at all masculinity. It is most urgent, then, to promote alternative models of being a man which reject the power-oriented pull of patriarchy. The same applies to women, for a distressing paradox of feminism is that it has liberated many of us into claiming empowerment along the same lines as patriarchal men; just consider British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Giving rise to much controversy, Connell has theorized that patriarchy depends on the constant renewal of hegemonic masculinity, a model ‘constructed in relation to women and to subordinated masculinities’ and aimed at ‘preventing alternatives [from] gaining cultural definition and recognition as alternatives, confining them to ghettos, to privacy, to ­unconsciousness’ (186). Connell, Hearn, and Kimmel (and in Britain, ­Victor Seidler) defend the idea that men can be very active anti-­patriarchal agents, for hegemony ‘is not automatic, and may be disrupted—or even disrupt itself’ (Connell 38). Seidler is nonetheless cautious for, whereas he welcomes the idea of building alternatives to patriarchal masculinity, he warns that this ought to be done through ‘an embodied alternative masculinity’ (in CNM 221) which avoids exaggerated idealization and the imposition of unrealistic standards. The foundation of any new masculinity, in short, should be embodied experience and ‘a dialogue towards something different’ (221), never a top downwards theoretical approach. This vision of patriarchy as a system that can be dismantled because it is not essential human nature agrees with Judith Butler’s presentation of gender as performative practice within a constructionist framework. Since ‘gender reality is created through sustained social performances’, this means that the ‘performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality’ (141) must be explored. Raising anti-­ patriarchal awareness is a very slow process, in part because radical feminism has attacked masculinity rather than patriarchy12 but also because ‘cultural accounts and public explanations of public patriarchy or accounts of cultural change in public patriarchy are rare’ (Hearn 65, my italics). This is a situation I am trying to correct here by presenting extreme cases of patriarchal entitlement to power, and by arguing that the stress should be laid, precisely, on villainy as the acting out of entitlement rather on what patriarchy interestedly calls evil. A major problem is that the basic principle of patriarchy, which is empowerment, is attractive also for the human groups subordinated to the rule of its hegemonic masculinity. Bram Dijkstra criticized in Idols of Perversity and in Evil Sisters how late Victorian and early 20th-century

Defining the Patriarchal Villain  11 cultures contributed to extensively demonizing women as a strategy to curb down their new feminist demand for empowerment. However, it is not uncommon for feminist authors to either bemoan the lack of female evildoers in fiction or to celebrate the alliance of women and monsters (or the female monsters) as positive. In The Sadeian Woman Angela Carter complained that ‘there have been so few notoriously wicked women in comparison to the number of notoriously wicked men’ because ‘our victim status ensures that we rarely have the opportunity. Virtue is thrust upon us’ (56). Similarly, reviewing a series of arch-­ villainesses in Victorian popular fiction, Willis laments that ‘there is no female equivalent of the terms “mastermind” or “master-criminal”’ (66). This reveals an uncomfortable hidden truth: patriarchal male ­empowerment is often envied instead of questioned. For this reason, the villainous femme fatale has become an object of admiration for feminist critics, like Mary Ann Doane. Despite Barbara Creed’s vigorous warning that the monstrous feminine is an obvious misogynistic patriarchal construction, feminism has found some satisfaction in the ‘titillating alliance between Beauty and the Beast, the powers of monsters and of women’ which ‘animates the hidden partnerships in such popular movies as King Kong and Alien, where women and creature are dynamically isolated by a male-controlled world over which they gain ascendancy’ (Auerbach 67). Other feminist critics have made a point of appropriating insult as feminist compliment, as we see in Aguiar’s title, The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in Literature. In contrast, I have excluded the villainess from this volume because she is in a very different position from the male villain, who is not limited by his gender to carry out his plans and who need not use his sexuality to fulfil them. The female patriarchal villain should, besides, be rejected by feminism because far from seeking all women’s liberation she only seeks her own individual empowerment. There is a suspicious patriarchal subtext in any declaration of admiration for the villain, male or female, as figures of empowerment since ‘It might be argued that we so admire the power monsters have that the disgust they engender is outweighed’ (Carroll 167). This stance ultimately celebrates the patriarchal Nietzschean rhetoric by which evil is a victim of good, presented as part of ‘Slave-morality’ or ‘essentially the morality of utility’ (Nietzsche 197). The idea of evil, Nietzsche argues, was enforced to curb down ‘Lofty spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even’ (122). My own view is completely different: patriarchy claims to defend good but constantly undermines it with the false pretence that (patriarchal) evil cannot be controlled, since it is a basic element of human nature. It is about time we glamorize good, beyond religious belief, as the formidable anti-patriarchal, active tool of (ethical) resistance it should be for both men and women.

12  Defining the Patriarchal Villain

Representations of the Villain in British Fiction: A Selection The present volume is divided into nine chapters, the first of which deals, as I have noted, mainly with Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler. Chapter 2 is devoted to the dictatorial system of power presented by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four and, particularly, to how O’Brien tortures Winston into accepting the hegemonic patriarchal values that Big Brother represents. Chapter 3 focuses on J.R.R. Tolkien’s much neglected Melkor/Morgoth, the villain in The Silmarillion, and on his far more popular lieutenant and successor Sauron in the Lord of the Rings as embodiments of a major issue: the constant recurrence of villainy. Most villains discussed here are mainly middle-aged men, with the only exception of the youthful villain analysed in Chapter 4. I suggest that Steerpike, the villain in Mervyn Peake’s fantasy novels Titus Groan and Gormenghast, should be read as an angry young man akin to those appearing in the 1950s British realist fiction and drama of the eponymous literary movement. Chapter 5 deals with one instance among the substantial gallery of James Bond villains, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, as he appears in three of the fairly neglected original novels by Ian Fleming, instead of the comparatively over-researched films. Chapter 6 focuses on John le Carré’s efforts to find new villains after the end of the Cold War, which had shaped his spy thrillers since the 1960s. The transition from arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper in The Night Manager to the diffuse network of villainy appearing in The Constant Gardener also suggests that, with the rise of the late 20th-century faceless corporation, this might be a villainous model to follow in fiction. In Chapter 7 I focus on villain Francis Urquhart as he is presented in the unjustly overlooked House of Cards trilogy by political novelist Michael Dobbs, leaving aside the two TV series which he has inspired. Chapter 8 deals with organized crime, particularly with the constant struggle of Ian Rankin’s ageing gangster Big Ger Cafferty to dominate Edinburgh’s criminal underworld as he battles a stream of bold upstarts. Finally, Chapter 9 deals with Lord Voldemort, the villain in the immensely popular Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, which I read as a warning against the return of fascism to Europe. It is my contention that whereas the British male writers whose work I analyse support a benevolent view of patriarchy—provided that is not an oxymoron—their melancholic pessimism is allowing villainy to ­increase its hold on democratic Western society. In contrast, Rowling, the only woman in my selection, endorses an important anti-patriarchal, antifascist message through her hero Harry Potter. His firm rejection of power and his investment in the values of friendship, domesticity, and civic duty suggest that he is the type of good guy readers and audiences

Defining the Patriarchal Villain  13 should be celebrating (instead of problematic male heroic figures like, for instance, James Bond). I am very much aware that the authors selected are middle-class, white men (except Rowling, of course) of the type dominating in patriarchal views of Literature but this choice is, as a matter of fact, part of the issue I am raising. The patriarchal narrative about villainy and heroism is being transmitted mostly through the work of men who, while moderately or radically critical of how this ideology works, lack a definite sociopolitical agenda aimed at destroying it. They are not necessarily collaborators but a symptom of what is missing in the struggle for gender equality: without educating men in a more straightforward anti-patriarchal stance they will continue to create, transmit, and admire stories that while appearing to undermine patriarchy by punishing the villain actually endorse it by celebrating traditional ­heroism. No positive, alternative, new masculinities can emerge without a gender pedagogy which addresses men and invites them to develop their own anti-patriarchal agenda. There is, as the reader will see, enough textual evidence to make a case for the distinctive nature of patriarchal British villainy, though, logically, I do not wish to stubbornly maintain that the UK villain is a singular, completely autonomous case. At any rate, even though the United Kingdom, like most nations in the world, constantly receives the impact of American cultural exports, the novels selected for study appear to deal with a distinct set of national features. There is at stake an intense, ongoing debate about what I must call classic British masculinity, the idealized model believed to embody fundamental decency, even a sense of honourability. Funnily, in the worlds built by le Carré and Dobbs the villains are obsessed by ­obtaining a knighthood—the very word (and the role of a Queen, Elizabeth II, as head of state since 1952) connects the current narrative of British patriarchal villainy with ancient Arthurian chivalric values, which are not buried as deeply as it is assumed. There is also a constant interrogation, running from Nineteen Eighty-Four to Harry Potter, about how easily British society can collapse because of internal threat—a preoccupation which might be at the root of Brexit. And although the texts selected mostly avoid questions of Empire and colonialism (with the exception of The Constant Gardener) there is nevertheless a manifest disappointment with the fact that so many advantaged white British men, even heroes publicly acclaimed, have turned out to be formidable villains when placed under the light of modern values. In pre-WWII fiction, the villain was mainly the racial other—with Fu Manchu as the classic e­ xample—but he tends to be now a white man at the core of British society. This is the reason why it so important to raise better awareness about who has access to privileged positions, and about why some individuals will stop at nothing to amass as much power as they can.

14  Defining the Patriarchal Villain

Notes 1 See http://villains.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page. 2 This popular approach to the villain consists mainly of two lines: on the one hand, online lists of favourite villains in diverse media (see, for instance, Empire’s list of ‘The Greatest Villains of All Time’, 17 August 2018, www.empireonline.com/movies/features/best-movie-villains/); on the other hand, illustrated books. See as recent examples of this second trend Bronson & Currie, Slade & Mah, or Thompson. To these, we need to add the anthologies, such as Mortimer’s, or Penzler’s more recent The Big Book of Rogues and Villains. 3 The volume edited by Fahreus and Yakalı-Çamoğlu, in which I participated, Villains and Villainy (2011) is subtitled Embodiments of Evil in Literature, Popular Culture and Media. James Heit’s edited volume Vader, Voldemort and Other Villains (also 2011) carries a very similar subtitle: Essays on Evil in Popular Media. In both cases, the novel occupies a marginal position. The special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester edited by Ricarda Schmidt, Heroes and Villains: A Multicultural Perspective (2002), is far more focused on Literature but mainly French and German. 4 The title of my volume alludes as well to Kracauer’s classic study of German film, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), which partly inspired my main thesis, though I do not follow its psychoanalytical framework. 5 This is the name which Hearn has chosen for his own research team (see www.oru.se/english/research/research-teams/rt/?rdb=g264). 6 In his discussion of obsessive, disabled avengers—such as Ahab, Quasimodo, Captain Hook, or Richard III—Norden argues that film directors ‘have developed cautionary tales in which symbolically castrated male figures who seek revenge against patriarchal authorities are often punished for their Oedipal crimes’ (137, my italics). In my view, the cautionary tale extends to all villains, abled or disabled. 7 The study of melodrama, firmly established by Michael R. Booth in the 1960s (see his volume English Melodrama), is now awaiting a new impulse. Most relevant recent work (Hays & Nikolopoulou or Hill, among others) is pre-21st century. For the transition from stage melodrama to film see Bratton, Cook & Gledhill, and Singer. 8 Including the villain’s evil laughter. According to Everson, silent cinema already had by 1910 ‘sophisticated villains, hoodlums, brutes, and other clearly defined types. But there were not as yet equally clearly defined faces to go along with these types’ (6). Paul Panzer, the villain in Pearl White’s popular film serial The Perils of Pauline (1914, twenty episodes), was pivotal in the emergence of a star system connected with recognizable villainous characters. 9 Androphobia is also a principle, surprisingly, of anti-feminist Victorian discourse. Sarah Stickney Ellis teaches in her best-selling volume The Women of England (1839) that man needs to battle the temptations addressed to ‘his inborn selfishness, or his worldly pride’ and that he needs woman’s assistance to look ‘directly to the naked truth’ and detect ‘the lurking evil of the specious act he was about to commit’ (53). In her view, woman is ‘like a kind of second conscience, for mental reference, and spiritual counsel, in moments of trial’ (53), protected as she is her homely reclusion from any moral fall. 10 Many titles of volumes on fictional villainy use the word ‘evil’ as a synonym: see for instance Bather’s Hollywood Cinema and Presentations of Evil: The Construction of Evil in Hollywood Cinema from 1989 to 2002.

Defining the Patriarchal Villain  15 11 See, nonetheless, Baring & Cashford for a fascinating account of how patriarchy replaced matriarchy in prehistoric times. 12 John Stoltenberg, also presenting himself as a radical feminist, has rejected masculinity as an incorrigible patriarchal construct in his classic Refusing to Be a Man.

Works Cited Aguiar, Sarah Appleton. The Bitch Is Back: Wicked Women in Literature. ­Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Alsford, Mike. Heroes and Villains. Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2006. Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982. Baring, Anne & Jules Cashford. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London: Penguin/Arkana, 1993. Bather, Neil. Hollywood Cinema and Presentations of Evil: The Construction of Evil in Hollywood Cinema from 1989 to 2002. Saarbrücken: VDM/­Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008. Baudrillard, Jean. La Transparence du Mal: Essai sur les Phénomènes ­E xtrêmes. Paris: Edicions Galilée, 1990. Bloom, Clive. Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory. Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Booth, Michael R. English Melodrama. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965. Boyer, Clarence Valentine. The Villain as Hero in Elizabethan Tragedy. London and New York: G. Routledge & Sons Ltd and E.P. Dutton & Co, 1914. Bratton, Jack; Jim Cook & Christine Gledhill (eds.). Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen. London: British Film Institute, 1994. Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Knopf, 2003. Brittan, Arthur. Masculinity and Power. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Bronson, Charles & Terry Currie. Heroes and Villains: The Good, the Mad, the Bad and the Ugly. London: John Blake, 2005. Buchbinder, David. Masculinities and Identities. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1994. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Paul Guyer (ed.). Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2015. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. ­London: Routledge, 1990. Butter, Michael. The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American fiction, 1939–2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror; or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago, 1990 (1979). CNM (Constructing New Masculinities). ‘Epilogue’. Alternative Masculinities in a Changing World, Àngels Carabí & Josep Maria Armengol (eds.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 219–234. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

16  Defining the Patriarchal Villain Dijkstra, Bram. Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996. ———. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Doane, Mary Ann. Femme Fatales. London: Routledge, 1991. Eagleton, Terry. On Evil. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP, 2010. Ellis, Sarah Stickney. The Women of England, their Social Duties and Domestic Habits. London: Fisher & Son, 1839. Everson, William K. The Bad Guys: A Pictorial History of the Movie Villain. New York: The Citadel Press, 1964. Fahraeus, Anna & Dikmen Yakalı-Çamoğlu (eds.). Villains and Villainy: ­Embodiments of Evil in Literature, Popular Media and Culture. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). Alan Sheridan (trans.). London: Penguin, 1991 (1977). Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents (1930). David McLintock (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002. Gil Calvo, Enrique. Máscaras Masculinas: Héroes, Patriarcas y Monstruos. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006. Hays, Michael & Anastasia Nikolopoulou (eds.). Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Hearn, Jeff. Men in the Public Eye: The Construction and Deconstruction of Public Men and Public Patriarchies. London: Routledge, 1992. Heit, Jamey (ed.). Vader, Voldemort and Other Villains: Essays on Evil in Popular Media. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Hill, Lyn Stiefel. Heroes, Heroines and Villains in English and American Melodrama, 1850–1990. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1997. Hyman, Gwen. Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-­ Century British Novel. Athens, OH: Ohio UP 2009. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. London: Routledge, 2002 (1981). John, Juliet. Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture. ­Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Kekes, John. Facing Evil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990. Kimmel, Michael S. The Gendered Society. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947). Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2004. Lara, María Pía. Narrating Evil. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Mank, Gregory William. The Hollywood Hissables. London: Scarecrow, 1989. Midgley, Mary. Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay. London: Routledge & ­Kegan Paul, 1984. Miller, Pavla. Patriarchy. New York: Routledge, 2017. Morrell, Jessica. ‘Chapter 6: Bad to the Bones: Villains’. Bullies, Bastards and Bitches: How to Write the Bad Guys of Fiction. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2008. 119–150. Mortimer, John Clifford (ed.). The Oxford Book of Villains. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Morton, Adam. On Evil. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Defining the Patriarchal Villain  17 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil (1886). R.J. Hollingdale (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 (1973). Norden, Martin F. ‘The “Uncanny” Relationship of Disability and Evil in Film and Television’. The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television, Martin F. Norden (ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 125–43. Parkin, David. ‘Introduction’. The Anthropology of Evil, David Parkin (ed.). London: Basil Blackwell, 1985. 1–25. Penzler, Otto (ed.). The Big Book of Rogues and Villains. London: Penguin, 2017. Schelde, Per. Androids, Humanoids and Other Science Fiction Monsters. New York: New York UP, 1993. Schmidt, Ricarda (ed.) ‘Heroes and Villains: A Multicultural Perspective (special issue)’. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 84.3 (Autumn 2002): 1–196. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. ‘Vicarious Villainy and the Burden of Narrative Guilt’. The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, Stacy Gillis & Philippa Gates (eds.). Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2002. 11–23. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Slade, Arthur & Derek Mah. Villainology: Fabulous Lives of the Big, the Bad, and the Wicked. New York: Tundra Books, 2007. Stoltenberg, John. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. London: UCL Press, 2000 (1989). ‘The Greatest Villains of All Time’ (unsigned). Empire 17 August 2018. www. empireonline.com/movies/features/best-movie-villains/ Thompson, Ben. Badass: The Birth of a Legend: Spine-Crushing Tales of the Most Merciless Gods, Monsters, Heroes, Villains, and Mythical Creatures Ever Envisioned. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Willis, Chris. ‘The Female Moriarty: The Arch-Villainess in Victorian Popular Fiction’. The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, Stacy Gillis & Philippa Gates (eds.). Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2002. 57–68.

1 Adolf Hitler The Threat of Absolute Villainy

The Will to Power: Hitler and the Missing German Hero Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) may be a hero for his followers, past and present, but for most he is the quintessential villain, the worst person in all the years of human history. The other contender to the title of most notorious world villain, Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), possibly caused a much higher number of victims.1 Yet, Hitler’s bigger disrepute is linked to the sinister singularity of the industrial methods of mass extermination used in the concentration camps of Nazi-occupied Central Europe. The horror of the Shoah, which Hitler no doubt instigated, has installed a moral barrier in international politics that should never be crossed again. Regrettably, local genocides perpetrated by other villains, similarly motivated by ethnic or racial prejudice, are still being committed, as the tragic cases of Rwanda and Myanmar show. Despite the plethora of fiction based on Hitler, 2 there is not a major t­ itle that offers a comprehensive representation of his villainous personality. This is offered, instead, by the many political biographies about the Nazi dictator. Joachim Fest’s Hitler (1973), written in German, is not only an indispensable text in our collective struggle to make sense of the Führer but also an instance of a significant difficulty: the language barrier. Hitler is predominantly discussed and represented in English since, regrettably, access to German scholarship and fictional representation is more limited. Ian Kershaw’s pioneering study The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (1983) was originally published in German in 1980 and only became widely acknowledged as a seminal work after the author rewrote it in English. Kershaw and other eminent British historians have been ­instrumental in generating widespread consensus on how Hitler should be ­approached. The solid bio-historiographic tradition which they have collectively ­established begins with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of ­Hitler (1947), continues with Allan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952, revised 1964), and leads to Kershaw’s massive biography Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (1998) and Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (2000).3 Kershaw never uses the word ‘villain’, even though his detailed portrait

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  19 of Hitler is based on the thesis that he was the opposite of the heroic figure which his Nazi followers manufactured for public consumption. Despite granting that Hitler will be always remembered as ‘the embodiment of modern political evil’, Kershaw carefully avoids discussing evil, judging it to be ‘a theological or philosophical, rather than a historical, concept’ (Nemesis xvii) that might even hinder a serious examination of Hitler’s case. Kershaw insists, above all, that ‘Without the changed conditions, ­ ational the product of a lost war, revolution, and a pervasive sense of n humiliation, Hitler would have remained a nobody’ (Hubris 132). Using a structuralist approach—inspired by the work of his mentor, German historian Martin Broszat, on the bonds connecting Hitler and the German people or Führer-Bindung—Kershaw shuns the personalist approach to investigate instead how and why Hitler, a marginal man, was granted such a staggering amount of power by his fellow citizens. According to Kershaw’s main predecessor, Alan Bullock, ‘Hitler had only one programme: power, first his own power in Germany, and then the expansion of German power in Europe’ (489). Kershaw stresses, in the preface of the condensed edition, that ‘My biography was above all intended to be a study of Hitler’s power’ (xxvii, my italics). Still, Kershaw typically bypasses the issue of how patriarchy helped Hitler. If the Austrian ‘bizarre misfit’ (xxvii) could ever aspire to pan-­G erman national leadership this is because he was born male—a necessary ­requirement for such radical empowerment though not, obviously, the only one. Kershaw comments occasionally on the singularity of Hitler’s behaviour as a man, noting that women were just ‘an adornment in a “men’s world”’ (Hubris 352), but without considering how exactly his exclusive masculine circle worked. This is an important omission in a work that approaches Hitler from an angle stressing primarily the mechanism of his astonishing access to power in 1930s German male-­ dominated society. Kershaw, nonetheless, supports what might be called a benevolent view of patriarchal heroism and, as a reluctant biographer expressing a constant contempt for his subject, he is particularly annoyed that Hitler presented himself as a hero. Kershaw does not downplay Hitler’s most evident personal talents, but he invests much energy on denying Hitler’s ‘greatness’, or even ‘negative greatness’, because this would ‘explain nothing whatsoever about the terrible history of the Third Reich’ (Hubris xxiv). He highlights, above all, the mismatch between what he himself called ‘the Hitler myth’ and the far more mundane reality of the man Adolf. Kershaw asserts repeatedly that Hitler’s performance as the ­German Führer needs to be judged not on personal merit but as ‘a role made possible only through the underestimation, mistakes, weakness, and collaboration of others’ (Hubris xxvi). Ironically, the process of proving that Hitler lacked any truly heroic qualities summons a strange

20  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy patriarchal phantom: the undefeatable villain that Hitler might have been if he had really lived up to his public image. Kershaw’s detachment of power from the framework of patriarchy and his presentation of Hitler as a bungling leader made by others, instead of a self-made, awe-inspiring figure suggest that he is criticizing the empowerment of this specific man rather than the dangers of excessive power. His approach helps us, in any case (and most crucially), to understand that criminality of the scope and depth the Führer engaged in may emerge from the sense of entitlement—the will to power—of a singular individual only if there is a collective failure to control him. The tragedy in Hitler’s case is that no German hero could restrain the villain because Hitler pre-empted this scenario by presenting himself as the ideal German hero, while fabricating the lie that Jewish Bolshevism was the real villain. Defeating Hitler required ultimately a massive alliance of heroic foreign forces, so unstable that after his defeat in 1945 the whole world was plunged into the new patriarchal age of the Cold War, with mirror villainies—abusive capitalism, dictatorial Communism—in each block.

Appropriating the Narrative of Heroism: Hitler, the Villain Unmasked Kershaw claims that ‘Hitler was a puzzle. This much can be deduced from the errors of judgement of so many observers of his meteoric rise then rapid grasp of an unshakeable hold on power’ (Making Friends 25). He was no mystery, however, for the British feminists keeping an eye on him, among them Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Katherine Burdekin. They instantly read Hitler’s rise (and, generally, Fascism) as a patriarchal issue, expressing their fear that the Führer might embody not only mythical heroism but also invincible villainy. Burdekin’s notable novel Swastika Night (published in 1937 under the penname Murray Constantine) presents a grim, dystopian future seven centuries after Hitler’s military victory. Displaying a ‘remarkable’ awareness of ‘the Nazis’ methods of achieving and maintaining their ambitions’ (Holden 148), Burdekin anticipates horrors later confirmed, including the Jewish Holocaust. Her chilling cautionary tale is, paradoxically for a feminist author, particularly cruel with the women, who are partly blamed for their own patriarchal enslavement as weak individuals only too willing to follow the men’s lead. Shaw argues that Swastika Night did not make a great impact4 because Burdekin ‘was writing at a time when the feminist movement was overshadowed by the world political situation’ (44); Hitler was perceived as a general threat rather than specifically as a danger for women. However, the reason for its limited impact might be, more accurately, how Burdekin’s abrasive novel alienates both male and female readers; also, that alternate

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  21 history in which Hitler wins could only become an appealing fantasy after his defeat. In Swastika Night Hitler is venerated as a God in Nazi-dominated Europe and Africa (Imperial Japan runs the other half of the world). The plot concerns the betrayal of his pervasive cult by the nobleman Von Hess, one of the Knights supposed to safeguard it. He can no longer tolerate the Nazi manipulation of historical truth and the wholesale destruction of culture ordered to conceal that manipulation (an aspect of Burdekin’s novel which may have inspired Orwell). Von Hess passes onto his descendants a dangerous legacy consisting of a book—his personal attempt to rebuild the lost memory of civilization—and a revealing photo. Whereas the countless artistic representations of the divine ­Hitler celebrate his ‘Colossal height, long thick golden hair, a great manly golden beard spreading over his chest, deep sea-blue eyes, the noble rugged brow—and all the rest’ (66), the photo shows a very different man: (…) he was dark, his eyes were brown or a deep hazel, his face was hairless as a woman’s except for a small black growth on the upper lip. His hair was cropped short except for one lank piece a little longer which fell half over his forehead. He was dressed in uncomely tight trousers like a woman’s instead of the full masculine breeches of all the statues and pictures, and his form was unheroic, even ­almost unmale. Where were the broad shoulders, the mighty chest, the lean stomach and slender waist and hips? This little man was almost fat. (67, my italics) Even feminist Burdekin falls into the trap of debasing Hitler by using misogynistic language which highlights his being too feminine, too ‘unmale’, to play the hero’s part, a misguided authorial choice that ­inadvertently endorses patriarchy. Hitler’s ridiculous personal image actually disrupted two stereotypes at the same time, which is why he mystified so many, including watchful Burdekin: his followers constantly inflated his attractive to enhance his heroic appeal, whereas his detractors struggled to connect his peculiar looks with conventional views of villainy. This confusion acted in ­H itler’s favour for, while his enemies reached the wrong conclusion that such an oddball could hardly cause serious trouble, his cult grew. Hitler, in short, exploited his unconventional looks not only to maintain his myth but also, even more importantly, to divert his opponents’ attention from his actual villainy. That he was a downright villain was only generally acknowledged when WWII began in 1939 and he finally showed his true colours. Hitler’s image is now so closely connected with villainy that it is extremely difficult to understand how he was perceived in the 1920s and 1930s, when he cultivated a style of what can only be called in-your-face

22  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy celebrity, presenting himself as a disconcerting public figure. In his early stages as a politician, before he donned the brown Nazi uniform (or a suit in more formal occasions), ‘His trilby, light-coloured raincoat, leather leggings and riding-whip gave him (…) the appearance of an eccentric gangster’ (Kershaw Hubris 282). In a key passage criticizing how ‘the blindness of the conservative Right’ put ‘the power of a nationstate containing all the pent-up aggression of a wounded giant’ into his hands (Hubris 424), Kershaw even calls Hitler ‘the dangerous leader of a political gangster-mob’ (424). That was his strategy: Hitler mystified his ­upper-class patrons with his incongruous image without truly concealing who he really was, trusting that their ‘blindness’ would befuddle them and aid his cause. The ruse did work. Hitler seems, then, to have perfectly understood the advantages of a ridiculous self-presentation. Koschorke notes that combining a ‘comical figure’ with widespread terror is a strategy often followed by dictators who ‘somehow seem ludicrous’ (50) but are in fact tyrannical—Kim Jong-Un, the North Korean absolute ruler, is a current example. Koschorke even speculates that odd-looking men who become terrifying autocrats may be ‘trying to compensate for their lack of legitimate power through megalomania’ (50, my italics), a declaration which, unfortunately, suggests that the more attractive men are entitled to ‘legitimate’ patriarchal power. The search for radical empowerment is not caused, as Koschorke contends, by the social ostracism piled on oddlooking men but despite it. In fact, the overambitious men aware that their odd looks might be an obstacle to their patriarchal empowerment tend to emphasise the less favourable features of their appearance to confuse their enemies. As Theweleit observes, ‘The Führer was certainly ridiculous; but only to the extent that a certain level of ridiculousness was intended or accepted’ (408, original emphasis). Once the Nazis became used to Hitler’s singular looks, the ‘mystique of power’ did the rest, even transforming ‘the antithesis of sexuality’ into a sex-symbol for many women (Hubris xxvii) and an admirable luminary for many men. The construction of Hitler’s heroic public image was based on his deft control of new media, just as the social networks are aiding today many celebrities to establish themselves as brands. Before 1933, ‘Hitler’s reputed appeal as a public speaker was the result of being in his presence and hearing his voice, rather than any direct form of mass mediation’ (Bathrick 148), except for photography. The 1932 book by Hitler’s official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Wie Ihn Keiner Kennt (or The Hitler Nobody Knows) was the culmination of a close relationship started in the mid-1920s. The newspapers, the newsreels reporting the massive Nazi rallies, the propaganda films, the gramophone recordings (introduced for the 1932 Reichstag elections campaign), the use of state radio once in power, Lenni Riefenstahl’s documentaries—Der Sieg des Glaubens (The Victory of Faith, 1933) and Triumph des Willens

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  23 (Triumph of the Will, 1935)5 —and the 1936 Olympic Games,6 amplified an image carefully constructed in the previous decade, soon to become iconic through constant repetition (Bathrick 149).7 Hitler’s public image was focused largely on his face. ‘Whereas ­Mussolini revelled in virile images of himself as a sportsman or athlete’, Kershaw notes, ‘Hitler had a deep aversion to being seen other than fully clothed’ (Hubris 282), knowing that his body was just average. According to Claudia Schmölders,8 the concern about the disparity between the man and the Aryan ideal led Hitler’s propaganda machine to recycle, in a widely distributed leaflet of 1932, a letter written in 1923 by Houston Chamberlain—the racist British-born philosopher married to Richard Wagner’s daughter Eva—in which he described Hitler’s face enthusiastically, admiring in particular his magnetic eyes. Schmölders suggests that Chamberlain’s overgenerous description was instrumental in turning the Aryan ‘racist attention away from sheer bodily proportions to the soul’ (30), supposedly visible in the eyes. Some still doubt that Hitler’s eyes were blue but most who met him claimed to have been mesmerised by his direct, manly gaze. Beyond the face, the fascination for Hitler’s undeniable demagogic talents and for his voice—coloured by his distinct Austrian accent— is a central part of ‘the fundamentally acoustic seduction of Hitlerism’ (Schmölders 20). Hitler himself explains in the preface to Mein Kampf that he based his meticulous self-training as a public speaker on the idea that ‘every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers’ (n.p. online), a strategy learned from listening to his detested Marxist enemies as a young man in Vienna. His passion for opera, Schmölders observes, must have played a fundamental role in his understanding of accurate speech delivery and, presumably, of acting as well. Hitler ‘was above all a consummate actor’ who shone in ‘the stage-managed occasions’ when ‘his natural rhetorical talent was harnessed to well-honed performing skills’ (Hubris 280). No wonder, then, that Epping-Jäger refers to the Nazi Party’s ‘phonocentric model of propaganda’ (85), a model greatly aided by this organization’s pioneering use of the loudspeaker from 1928 onward, ‘which uniquely allowed for an efficient way of directly addressing mass audiences’ (90). Radio was also essential to bring Hitler’s voice into most German homes in the 1930s, though, curiously, it was used mainly to broadcast live mass events since, if recorded in the studio, ‘Hitler’s voice was perceived to lack energy and listeners found it disagreeable in its evocation of barrack yards’ (Epping-Jäger 96).9 ‘It seems to me misleading’, Theweleit protests, ‘to see the Führer as a demagogue—or his speeches as theatrical’ (413); the Führer, he argues, was perceived as someone ‘bestowing a gift on his people. He offers them a religion—not a substitute, but a real one’ (413). Hitler’s speeches may not have been mere theatre but Theweleit overlooks the fact that

24  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy preaching requires good acting skills to get the message across. Leaving aside the recurrent readings of Hitler as a messianic figure—and the preoccupation of the Catholic Church with how his cult undermined organized religion—opera provided Hitler not only with a fundamental theatrical, aesthetic experience but also with the main elements for his self-presentation as a quintessential German hero. Hitler’s self-­fashioning explicitly as a Wagnerian hero ‘proved effective politically’ as he ‘was able to win respectability and cultural legitimacy and, eventually, to create a charismatic aura of genius for himself’ (Vaget 107). The advantage of the heroic alibi which Hitler exploited is that it relied on a consistent cultural discourse on the hero, which is missing for villainy. Sir James George Frazer’s influential The Golden Bough ­(issued in different editions between 1890 and 1915) refers abundantly to heroes; they are opposed to the Devil and to evil, not to villainy. Joseph Campbell’s influential study of the heroic monomyth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) offers no comment on the villain, though the warning that ‘The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs seem to prosper’ (15) describes Hitler’s sense of entitlement accurately. Arguably, it is in the seminal volume by Russian formalist Vladimir Propp Morphology of the Folk-tale (1928), a text contemporaneous with the early stages of Hitler’s political career, where we find important clues to read Hitler’s assault on power as part of an ancient patriarchal narrative about heroism. Propp’s analysis of the folk tale does consider the role of the villain principally as a narrative function, not as an embodiment of evil or the Devil. Propp approached the folk tale as a cultural artefact that should be studied as systematically as myth and religion from a strict formalist angle. He describes, accordingly, the main characters and their functions (or acts) in a large number of European tales, observing that the role of the villain is ‘to disturb the peace of a happy family, to cause some form of misfortune, damage, or harm’ (27). The villain often assumes a disguise which facilitates his persuasion of the hero and his personal circle to act as he bids; the villain proceeds next to do as much mischief as possible before his victims react. The villain, Propp claims, may act in nineteen different ways, for ‘The forms of villainy are exceedingly varied’ (31). Here is a relevant selection, applicable to Hitler’s dictatorship: 6, the villain causes bodily injury; 7, the villain causes a sudden disappearance; 9,  the villain expels someone; 13, the villain orders a murder to be committed; 15, the villain imprisons or detains someone; 19, the villain declares war. The excessive power displayed by the villain and the sheer havoc he wreaks forces eventually the hero to rebel and challenge the abuser to combat, which ends usually with the villain’s defeat, whether he dies or not. Hitler’s career presents many coincidences with this narrative model but also crucial differences: the villain kills himself and his body is not found; the misfortune he has caused is corrected but this

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  25 a pyrrhic victory, and the community he has dominated is conquered and divided, having failed to produce its own hero. Propp’s volume was translated into English in 1958 (into German in 1975) and could have, therefore, no impact on Hitler’s image during his dictatorship. The resistance against his heroic self-fashioning came eventually from American popular culture after the beginning of the war, with indispensable British contributions. Only the timely satire The Great Dictator (1940) directed by English comedian Charlie Chaplin managed to shake Hollywood out of its disastrous inertia about Hitler. On the other hand, the new superhero comics, starting with Superman’s presentation in Action Comics #1 (1938), offered new fictional territory to portray Hitler as a super-villain, following plotlines borrowed from British pulp and its popular villainous figures, such as Doctor Fu Manchu. Urwand’s recent volume The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler maintains that Hollywood studios, mostly headed by Jewish businessmen, refrained from criticizing the Nazis because they feared losing the potent German film market, the second largest abroad after Britain. Chaplin faced considerable resistance when he announced in 1938 plans to make The Great Dictator, a project which progressed only because President Roosevelt privately guaranteed him his support (see Brownlow’s documentary). While the demanding Chaplin worked painstakingly on his film, Hitler took the fateful decision of invading Poland, an aggression to which Hollywood finally responded by releasing the first openly anti-Nazi films in 1939: Confessions of a Nazi Spy, ‘the film industry’s call to consciousness for audiences about the Nazi threat in America’, but also the B-movie Hitler, Beast of Berlin, ‘the first to actually dramatize horrific Nazi excesses’ (Miller 5). Doherty explains that ‘the meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood, like a picture just out of focus—fuzzy and dimly lit at first, sharp and fully outlined only at the end’ (12), when Hitler’s villainy was finally acknowledged. The Great Dictator (1940) was undoubtedly an act of bravery by a man who understood the fragility of his position both in the USA and in Germany. Chaplin was acclaimed by huge crowds during his visit to ­B erlin in 1931, which turned him into the target of an already burgeoning Nazi animosity, based on a false rumour that he was Jewish. Chaplin was perfectly aware of the accidental connection between him and Hitler prompted by the toothbrush moustache both sported. An American export to Germany which became wildly popular after WWI (Cohen n.p. online), each man used his signature moustache very differently. Chaplin grew his own for comic effect, as part of his Tramp’s characterization, which is why he found Hitler’s looks so bizarre. When Chaplin saw the Führer addressing the crowds in postcards sent from Germany by his friend Conrad Vanderbilt,10 his impression was that ‘The face was obscenely comic, with its absurd moustache, unruly,

26  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy stringy hair and disgusting, thin little mouth. I could not take Hitler seriously’ (319–320). After studying Hoffman’s photos of Hitler and his appearances in newsreel films (Bathrick 150), Chaplin proceeded to exploit the chance similarity to create his masterpiece,11 in which he played both the persecuted Jewish barber Finkel and the bumbling dictator Adenoyd Hinkel. Today The Great Dictator is regarded as a landmark film, particularly because of Chaplin’s pacifist final speech, but it was poorly received at the time of its release. The United States was still pursuing a non-­interventionist policy which was only abandoned in December 1941, after the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbour. The reluctance to become involved in the European war against Hitler explains why the US Senate even passed a resolution denouncing Chaplin’s film as pro-war propaganda (Doneson 42).12 Pearl Harbour confirmed the worst suspicions underlying the xenophobic concept of the Yellow Peril. Western fears of Asian invasion date back to Genghis Khan’s 13th-century brutal invasions but the Russo-­ Japanese War of 1904–1905 over Manchuria and Korea was a source of direct concern in the early 20th century, chiefly in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany. In Britain, China rather than Japan was perceived as the main danger because of the series of conflicts developing throughout the 19th century between the two imperial powers, including the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. Rampant ‘Chinaphobia’ inspired English novelist Sax Rohmer to create his immensely popular villain, presented to the world in The Mystery of Fu Manchu (serialized in Collier’s 1912– 1913, published in the United States as The Insidious Fu Manchu). Dr.  Fu Manchu, possessor of ‘magnetic eyes’ and ‘one giant intellect’, is ‘the yellow peril incarnate in one man’ and ‘the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on earth for centuries’ (Mystery n.p. online, my italics). My suggestion is that the formidable fictional arch-villain in transition from Victorian to Modern Britain is the patriarchal figure against whom Hitler was being measured in the 1930s—a sort of shadow companion to the heroic Nazi Hitler myth and, thus, much closer to the villainous Hitler that we recognize today. Literary villains—from Richard III to Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco, passing through Ann Radcliffe’s Schedoni—­always possess a keen intelligence but the new-style archvillains of 20th-century British popular fiction were presented as masterminds capable of world conquest. Apart from Count Dracula, Fu Manchu’s main predecessor appears to be Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor James Moriarty, created by Conan Doyle to end his hero’s career in ‘The Final Problem’ (1893). Holmes describes here Moriarty: ‘He is the Napoleon of crime,13 Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  27 first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized’. (Doyle n.p. online) Moriarty impressed the general public with the idea that villains should be ‘of good birth and excellent education’ and extraordinary in some intellectual capacity (he excels at mathematics). Far from seeing Moriarty as a product of patriarchy, Doyle invokes the classic Victorian belief in the genetics of violence; in Holmes’s opinion, ‘A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers’ (n.p. online). Rohmer abandoned his Fu Manchu novels in 1917, after three successful volumes, but when he resumed the series, in 1931, he eventually wrote a novel featuring Hitler. ‘Like many colonialists/imperialists’, Christensen rationalizes, ‘Rohmer was concerned with peace and stability, but he was paternalistic rather than fascistic. He was more frightened of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union than of Fu Manchu’s phantom empire-building’ (82). In The Drums of Fu Manchu (1939), the ­Chinese arch-villain plans to eliminate all the men threatening to unleash a new world war, for ‘A European conflict would be inimical to my plans. If any radical change take place in the world’s map, my own draughtsmen will make it’ (e-book pos. 2757). He threatens directly Mussolini (here Pietri Monaghani) and Hitler (as Rudolf Adion), whom he kidnaps and eventually eliminates; the new German Government pretends that his death was due to natural causes. WWII is prevented, though not at all for pacifist reasons, whereas the English hero (detective Nayland Smith) occupies an ambiguous position, appearing to be more interested in who is murdering the warmongers than in securing peace. When Smith comes across a humiliated but proud Adion, here Fu Manchu’s prisoner, he sympathises: ‘in that moment I understood why a great, intellectual nation had accepted him as its leader. Whatever his failings, this man was ­ ccasion fearless’ (e-book pos. 2738–2740). This was possibly the last o when such sympathy was shown by a British writer. Fu Manchu’s most direct American descendant is Emperor Ming the Merciless, the villain in Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon comic strip ­series, launched in 1934 as a direct competitor of the wildly popular Buck Rogers, created in 1928 by Philip Nowlan. American comics combined the heritage of British and US pulp fiction with a new vision of heroism and villainy, which is still essential for 21st-century worldwide culture. It is, then, important to recall that the comic book superhero ­appeared in parallel to the turbulent late 1930s and early years of WWII: Superman, as I have noted, first appeared in 1938 (eventually participating in anti-Nazi plots) whereas Captain America was created in 1940 as

28  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy straightforward war propaganda. Conroy writes in his illustrated v­ olume Comic Book Villains that ‘Hitler was made for comics’ as ‘the living embodiment of evil, a megalomaniacal, murdering conqueror’ but also ‘a walking caricature, a slight, unattractive ranter with a bad haircut and a comical moustache’ (230). This, however, was a new perception only endorsed after 1939; before that year the megalomania and the ridiculousness were not generally perceived. Once Hitler was defeated by ‘the common man’ (232), Conroy adds, the comics declined because ‘Great heroes needed great villains, but none was greater than Hitler’ (232). This closed the process of Hitler’s unmasking and of his fall from hero to villain.

Contesting the ‘Hitler Myth’: The Problem of Charismatic Villainy and Mass Complicity Kershaw’s denial of Hitler’s ‘greatness’ is only partly successful, as it can be seen in his problematic handling of the alternative concept he uses: Max Weber’s notion of ‘charismatic leadership’. This, as Kershaw interprets it, lays the stress on the perceiver (German society) rather than on ‘the personality of the object of their adulation’ (Hubris xii). As an alternative, Riall suggests exploring ‘why people considered [Hitler] to be great, and how his reputation changed over time’ (391). Yet, since Kershaw adamantly refuses to acknowledge any greatness in Hitler, in his biography he opts for a strong resistance ‘against a politics of affect, a politics that depends exactly on the fixation on one charismatic person’ (Horn 113). In fact, Kershaw misreads Weber, who maintains that ‘As a rule, charisma is a highly individual quality. This implies that the mission and the power of its bearer is qualitatively delimited from within, not by an external order’ (1113, my italics). Whether it is a personal objective quality, as Weber suggests, or a subjective collective ­interpretation, as Kershaw prefers, neither man perceives that charisma is a feature of patriarchal empowerment, both heroic and villainous. In my view, Hitler’s charisma, the feature that allowed him to attract so many followers across very different periods in his political career, was the bodily expression of his sense of entitlement and, thus, the basis of the mystique of his power. As I have observed, Wagner’s operas were a main source for Hitler’s self-fashioning as a hero. As Kershaw contends, Hitler also appropriated the heroic myth of the ‘Führer of the Germans’, a product of the 19thcentury patriarchal, Romantic, völkisch view of the nation as a damsel in distress waiting for the messianic leader/knight to rescue her. The 1918 defeat and the rise of the Weimar Republic altered the class background of the myth so that ‘Ideal leadership was now envisaged in a man from the people whose qualities would embody struggle, conflict, the values of the trenches’ (Myth 19). Ideally, this hero ‘would destroy the

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  29 old privilege- and class-ridden society and bring about a new ­beginning, uniting the people in an ethnically pure and socially harmonious “national community”’ (19). Hitler initially saw himself as the ‘drummer’ of the German messiah to come, though in Mein Kampf (1925, English 1933)—written in the Landsberg prison as he served a lenient sentence for the failed 1923 Munich Putsch—he already presented himself as a perseverant individual ready to carry out any heroic mission. Goebbels assumed the responsibility of turning Hitler’s precarious political career into a myth based on the lie that the Führer was working according to carefully laid plans which he was doing his best to implement. In reality, Kershaw stresses, Hitler was an opportunist constantly improvising his next move and, essentially, a person ‘incapable of systematic work’ who later enjoyed his position as dictator because in this capacity he ‘could fully indulge the unordered, indisciplined, and indolent lifestyle that had never altered since his pampered youth in Linz and drop-out years in Vienna’ (Hubris 343). Hitler, according to Kershaw’s interpretation of his career, played the mythical role written by his Nazi collaborators initially with some aloofness. Essentially, between 1925 and 1936, the years leading from his consolidation as Nazi leader to the breaking of the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno (with the remilitarization of the Rhineland), ­Hitler used his Führer persona to accrue the absolute power that would later enable him to implement his real political programme: the German European expansion on the basis of Lebensraum policies and the Jewish genocide. Hitler’s career advanced rapidly because his radical speeches appeared to offer the key to save Germany from post-1929 economic depression and the threat of Communism. In 1934 he finally conquered the top of the German political patriarchal hierarchy by merging into one the positions of Chancellor and Reich President, once President Paul ­Hindenburg—the only man who cast a shadow above him—died. Hitler had already eliminated, in the same year, the man he assumed to be his most dangerous lieutenant, SA leader Ernst Röhm, assassinated together with his henchmen in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.14 This new phase was characterized by Hitler’s struggle to keep the myth alive, which he did by carefully separating his personal heroic public presence from the villainous behaviour of his underlings, known as ‘little Hitlers’. He could manage this because ‘Many genuinely believed that matters, especially if unpalatable, were deliberately kept from Hitler, and that if he learned of them, he would act swiftly to set things right’ (Myth 97). The successful Rhineland march of 7 March 1936 was the tipping point at which Hitler’s ‘capacity for self-deception’ (Myth 264) took over: his personal vanity and the constant adulation he received profoundly altered his perception of reality. The ‘constructed image of omnipotence and omniscience’ ended up dominating him, and, so ‘his judgement became impaired by faith in his own infallibility’ (264). Nobody could

30  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy restrain his sense of entitlement and this self-deception ‘ultimately consumed all traces of the calculating and opportunistic politician, leaving in its place only a voracious appetite for destruction—and ultimately self-destruction’ (264). While he plunged Germany into the abyss, Hitler never stopped perceiving himself as a hero besieged by his enemies, above all France and the Soviet Union. Since direct contact with the German population drastically diminished once Hitler assumed the role of main military strategist, he misread their stance: his fellow citizens supported his territorial conquests only provided occupation did not lead to a new war. After the disastrous attempt at conquering Stalingrad in 1943, once the 1941 pact with Stalin was broken, ‘the German people’s love affair with Hitler was at an end. Only the bitter process of divorce remained’ (Nemesis 557). The charismatic capital accumulated by the heroic, mythical Hitler was cancelled out when the Führer’s self-centred, insensitive villainy broke all bounds. ‘Men’s sense of entitlement’, Michael Kimmel writes, ‘is the source of much of men’s experience of powerlessness’ (216), which often ­results in direct physical violence, when reality frustrates their patriarchal ­expectations of control over relationships, family, the workplace, friendship, and so on. In Hitler’s case—and surely that of other tyrants, like Stalin—a monumental egocentrism constantly denies any impression of actual powerlessness, so that the deeply engrained sense of patriarchal entitlement grows despite the setbacks; these may even appear to confirm the personal impression of greatness challenging the world. Most men frustrated by circumstances sink into obscurity, but Hitler benefitted from a series of faults in the structure of German patriarchy after WWI that allowed him to empower himself even beyond his wildest dreams. His case, as Kershaw argues, is not personal but structural, though I insist that it is also gendered and dependent particularly on how other patriarchal men failed to curb down his villainy. A striking aspect of Kershaw’s presentation of Hitler’s childhood, youth, and early adulthood is that nothing justifies the sense of entitlement to power so clearly expressed in Mein Kampf. Still, the talentless youngster who dreams of artistic greatness in Vienna is very similar to the many young men refusing to adapt to the current educational and labour system. I am indeed suggesting that the world is full of potential patriarchal tyrants whose sense of entitlement is constantly curbed down by the extant institutions, from the school to the law, passing through the family. The frequent lashings outs—for instance, the school massacres perpetrated by young American patriarchal males—show how poorly that restrain works. At a high political level, democracy is supposed to prevent any villainous attempts at amassing tyrannical power, yet Hitler’s case is a most potent warning against this illusion of democratic security. The core of Hitler’s villainy, then, is not some mystifying idea of evil but how he managed to take his patriarchal sense of entitlement

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  31 to an extreme thus far unknown by patriarchy itself and by so-called human civilization (perhaps with the only exception of Stalin). We can, then, define villainy as the enjoyment of unbounded power within a patriarchal context and not as an intrinsic personality trait, though I grant that what appears to be uniquely personal is the degree with which each man responds to patriarchy’s call to exercise their entitlement to power as men. Most men simply ignore it and, fortunately, only a tiny minority of potential tyrants ever conquers power. The individual peculiarities that distinguish each villain depend mostly on their personal inclinations, that is, on their choice of field to apply their excessive power. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman writes about Hitler that ‘The man’s hatred and the concentrated power did not have to meet’ (77), since no political theorist has proven that ‘anti-­Semitism is functionally indispensable for a totalitarian regime’ (77). Bauman notes that Hitler’s immense power could have been applied to other causes, but he happened to be personally inclined to agree with the rampant antiSemitism of his time (also with the pan-Germanic Lebensraum policies). Hitler could not empower himself as an artist, which was his dream, but he found himself empowered as a politician to carry out detestable policies which others had invented. He was wily enough to understand that the brutal projects announced in Mein Kampf would meet national and international resistance; hence, he followed a cautious programme, slowly but steadily undermining the German resistance against waging a new war and implementing genocidal policies on the sly. He had a thorough, complete understanding of his own villainy and, so, he kept himself at a distance from the development of the Endlösung, or Final Solution, a tactic which allowed him to continue his irrational project of expansion until his villainy became evident to all. The situation which Kershaw describes is not a dramatic fall from grace, but a progressive erosion of the Führer myth caused by the collective sacrifice in war, with the Jewish question playing a minor role. The few who rose to the heroic challenge and tried to kill the villain— ­ alkyrie the worker Georg Elser in 1939, or the members of the 1944 V ­Operation led by Colonel Henning von Tresckow and Lieutenant Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg—found that their mistimed bombs could not harm a tyrant seemingly protected, as Hitler himself claimed, by Fate. Internal German resistance could never be truly effective or large enough, because of the constant Nazi murders of ­ olitical Socialist and Communist opponents, or their imprisonment in p concentration camps like Dachau, near Munich (the first of its type, established in 1933). In the Third Reich, besides, the readiness of ordinary citizens ‘to inform the police or Nazi Party about their suspicions had devastating effects on resistance’ (Gellately 262). These concerned members of the public may not have been fully aware of how the Jews were being

32  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy exterminated outside Germany, but they were well informed about the German camps, either through the media or because they were in their own neighbourhood (Gellatelly 257). They also generally believed that political prisoners deserved their ill-treatment. Nazism, then, is seemingly a case of collective villainy affecting the whole German nation of the time, with the obvious exceptions of the regime’s victims. There were diverse degrees of villainy in the many-layered system of villainy established by the Nazi Party—from the children in the Hitler Youth reporting their parents to the SS to Hitler himself—but there was no doubt a collective will to act out a national sense of entitlement over the lives and homes of the hated others. Hitler provided, then, a general framework for each Nazi and proNazi individual to accrue a certain measure of power over disempowered enemies and satisfy personal urges as he (sometimes she) contributed to the regime. Before I turn to the process which Kershaw calls ‘working towards the Führer’ I must briefly consider Hannah Arendt’s controversial views, presented in her volume Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). After attending some sessions of the trial of former Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who organized the logistics of the Final Solution following orders from his superior Reinhard Heydrich, Arendt contrasted two codes of evil in her postscript, the literary and the factual, or ‘banal’: Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’. Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. (287) For Lara, Arendt’s diagnosis severs the tie between evil and the ‘strong passions (e.g. ambition, hatred, pride, or envy)’ (150). In Halberstam’s view, Arendt denies human monstrosity, showing that ‘evil works often as a system, it works through institutions and it works as a banal (meaning “common to all”) mechanism’ (162). Any ‘moral idiot’, using Bilbeny’s phrase (23), indifferent to the existence of good, may become a new Eichmann, or Hitler. As Bauman concludes, ‘The most frightening news brought about the Holocaust and by what we learned of its perpetrators was not the likelihood that “this” could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it’ (152, original italics). In this transformation of the metaphysics of evil into the banality of evil, there is, nonetheless, a radical misunderstanding of the ­Shakespearean codes of villainy. ‘Much of what we find under the terrorizing regime of Hitler and Stalin’, Frye claims, ‘is also evident in Shakespeare’s

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  33 presentation of the Medieval Scottish tyrant Macbeth’ (83); this, he adds, is proof of the Bard’s ‘profound understanding of human nature’ (84). It is about time we correct this impression: what Shakespeare shows through his villains is an uncommon grasp of power-hungry patriarchy. When Lara insists that Richard III ‘is a true villain (…) portrayed as the premodern notion of the demonic’ but that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s ‘greatest evil character’ (31) she is, like Arendt, confusing the metaphysical (evil) with the social (patriarchal villainy). Hitler and his followers were not embodiments of evil, banal or otherwise, but real-life examples of what Shakespeare represents as villainous: an overwhelming sense of entitlement to patriarchal power (so weak in Macbeth that Lady Macbeth despairs and demands God to ‘unsex’ her). Underlings like Eichmann are by no means puzzling, either: the patriarchal alpha males claiming power can hardly do so alone, without the complicity of a host of minor villains. Eichmann is as unsurprising—as banal— as any gangster’s henchman and fairly easy to explain within a social patriarchal framework: tell a man that he faces no consequences for his acts and, if he agrees with your plans, he will follow you. This does not mean that right and wrong are not pertinent to judge villainy. In his critique of Arendt, Haslam points out that ‘People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right’ (19, my italics). There might be even two types of villainy: the pre-Nazi traditional one, in which the villain enjoys doing wrong because he expresses his power in this way, and a post-Nazi second variety. In this second type individuals understand that they are doing wrong but, in a classic example of Orwellian doublethink, persuade themselves that they are doing right. In his extensive comparative study The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, British historian Richard Overy considers the ‘moral universe of dictatorship’ (the title of Chapter 7, 265–303). Why, he wonders, did Hitler and Stalin believe that they were right? The overlapping of the personal ambition of these two self-empowered men with the rise of certain views of nature and history, Overy explains, resulted in ‘a moral displacement that relieved the regimes and their agents of direct responsibility for their actions: it could be, and was, argued that biological or historical necessity, not human caprice, produced the new moral order and governed human behaviour’ (268). Animated by ‘profound hatreds and resentments’ (641), each dictator gave free rein to violence ‘practised at every level of society’ (643) to construct utopia (Aryan or Communist) at any cost. For Overy, Hitler’s and Stalin’s immorality lies in how ‘Both leaders and led engaged in collective acts of misrepresentation so that truth became untruth and untruths masqueraded as truth’ (645). Again, classic Orwellian doublethink. In his controversial study Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen called for a revised

34  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy approach to the Shoah to investigate who exactly were the (mainly German) citizens involved in this monstrosity. In his view, ‘Simply put, the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say “no”’ (14, original italics). Using Overy’s vocabulary, this is how the ‘moral displacement’ happened. Kershaw is less radically antiGerman and does not present, besides, anti-Semitism as a major concern in Nazi Germany, surprising as this may sound. Yet there might be just a small difference in their views. In Goldhagen’s interpretation, Hitler’s rise is due to the desire of the general German population to find a catalyst for their widespread anti-Semitism, whereas in Kershaw’s reading Hitler projects onto Germany, aided by his popularity, a profound personal anti-Semitism. This generates ‘passive acquiescence if not outright approval for the escalating inhumanity of Nazi anti-Jewish policy’ (Myth 252), which is another way of ‘not saying “no”’. The passivity, rather than the active participation which Goldhagen denounces, granted the top Nazi hierarchy the self-confidence needed to implement the Endlösung. Although harsh anti-Jewish legislation could have been passed by others, without Hitler and ‘the unique regime he headed, the creation of a programme to bring about the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe would have been unthinkable’ (Nemesis 495). Anti-Semitism may have been a minor factor in Hitler’s empowerment but, once he became the autocratic ruler of Germany, popular ethnic hatred emerged with such intensity that the Nazis had to curb it down, under pressure of international opinion but also of the German citizens who grew afraid of unstoppable rioting. Lacking a clear vision of how the German Jews (1% of the population) should be expelled from the homeland, Hitler improvised as opportunities came up. When the intended deportation to Russia proved unfeasible after the Stalingrad disaster (1942–1943), Hitler’s minions proposed the Endlösung in the infamous Wannsee Conference (January 1943), which Hitler did not attend. Kershaw reads this absence as proof that Hitler proceeded by encouraging his underlings to develop their own sinister fantasies, in a procedure that he calls ‘working towards the Führer’. Kershaw cites a 1934 speech by a minor Nazi functionary—Werner Willikens, State Secretary in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry— to make this important point. Speaking to other Länder delegates Willikens declared that, since the Führer was too busy to control every aspect of government, it is ‘the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the Führer, to work towards him’, without fear of blunders and expecting ‘the finest reward of one day suddenly attaining the legal confirmation of his work’ (in Hubris 529). Engaged in bizarre Darwinian competition, encouraged by Hitler, the members of the diverse Nazi cadres dared each other to please their leader, increasingly radicalizing

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  35 their actions. This is how the Holocaust happened, Kershaw suggests: not on orders given by one man but as a result of this man’s providing a ‘general licence for barbarism’ which allowed his most direct inner circle (Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich), scholars of all kinds (including experts in racial issues), and countless bureaucrats ‘to let their imagination run riot in devising megalomaniac schemes for ethnic resettlement and social restructuring’ (Hubris 249), and, finally, the Endlösung. Hitler hated the Jews with particular intensity but he also treated with careless viciousness many other fellow human beings, including the ­German troops mercilessly sacrificed in the vain attempt to occupy Russia. The ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ (July 1933) resulted in the forced sterilization of about 400,000 German citizens, as part of the obsessive Nazi ethnic cleansing. The victims were considered unfit to produce top-standard so-called Aryan children despite being themselves Aryan. Later, between 1939 and 1941, the Nazi regime carried out secret mass exterminations of supposedly asocial individuals: the mentally ill and other diseased or disabled persons were either poisoned directly by their doctors or gassed (in moving vans). ­A ktion-T4 killed between 70,000 and 90,000 patients (perhaps twice as many) in a vast euthanasia programme also connected with Nazi social hygiene. Once the public outcry forced to close T4, its personnel were transferred to the new Polish extermination camps. There Zyklon-B (tested with Russian prisoners) started being used in 1943 to eliminate Jews but also Jehovah Witnesses, the Sinti, the Roma, homosexuals, and other political prisoners. The sinister routine was surely known to Hitler in all its grim details, though he never visited any camp nor did he ever mention in public what many Germans and Central European individuals knew first-hand. The astonishingly sadistic treatment of camp prisoners corresponds to a basic ugly truth: this is how we treat our fellow human beings when authorized and in the absence of punishment. The villainy displayed was so extreme that it took decades for the survivors to be believed; this is also the reason why the negationist theory, defended by David Irving among others, could gain a following (see Evans). Human beings were massively exterminated by the industrial machinery of death devised by Hitler’s villainous Nazi regime, but we still claim not to understand why captors and exterminators acted as they did. Yet, this is one of the clearest instances of how patriarchy works: if granted absolute power over other human beings, whose very humanity is denied by pouring limitless hatred onto them, the worst we are capable of surfaces. If, as I am arguing, the Holocaust is one of the many acts of collective villainy instigated by patriarchal lust for power and entitlement, how can the participation of women be explained? ‘As a mass phenomenon’, Fascism ‘exemplified men’s and women’s hunger for authority, wish for

36  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy security and wishes for merging with a bigger entity (Party, ideology, state, community)’ (Wieland 132). More accurately, any totalitarian regime consists of a political arrangement that disempowers all women and most men in order to guarantee the rule of a patriarchal, masculinist minority. Under Nazism not all German men reacted in the same way simply because not all were equally empowered or wished to empower themselves. They chose one of three ways: resistance, passive compliance, and active collaboration. So did German women, knowing beforehand that, if they chose to collaborate, they would be always limited by Nazi sexism and male supremacism. Before Hitler’s rise, German women lived in a strict patriarchal society, which limited their basic rights as did the rest of European nations. Both the old 1900 Civil Code and the new 1919 Weimar Constitution allowed German fathers and husbands to forestall or interrupt the education of the women under their legal tutelage. The Nazi regime attempted, besides, to control women’s bodies through racist, nationalist, natalist policies. ‘Where women’s experience under Nazism was unusual, indeed unique’, Jill Stephenson elucidates, ‘was in the realm of reproduction, where woman’s function as mother of the species made her distinctively the focus of attention, pressure and, in some cases, both physical and mental cruelty’ (5). Many German women (and men) resisted the Nazi impositions. These were also undermined by the forced sterilization of many supposedly defective German citizens, labelled antisocial as noted, and by the massive transfer of Aryan soldiers to the front once WWII started, which left the prospective ideal German mothers with few partners to breed Aryan children. Stephenson attributes the ‘explicitly male chauvinist character’ (17) of the Nazi Party (and dictatorship) to its having inherited the ­patriarchal hierarchical structures of the Army and the sense of male comradeship of the WWI trenches. Hitler was a misogynist who ­d isguised his contempt of women—including his common-law wife Eva Braun—under the pretence that men and women had separate but equally important functions. He followed in this the gender ideology that Victorian patriarchal men used to call euphemistically ‘the separation of the spheres’. Hitler excluded women from the highest valued professions, except in traditional women-related areas like nursing or primary education; despite the obstacles, however, some zealous Nazi women managed to access relatively important positions. Again, not all women reacted in the same way. When, in 1943, all non-­ Jewish German women were conscripted as workers, many found ways to disobey the call. Jefferson concludes that all patriarchal regimes see women as ‘a resource to be tapped when necessary and dispensed with when there were sufficient men’ (72)—­except in armies, until recently an exclusive male preserve—though their resistance is often undervalued.

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  37 Following feminist historian Claudia Koontz, Stephenson agrees that racism was more significant to the Nazi dictatorship than sexism: certainly, Jewish men were not granted any privileges over Jewish women. The racial divide, nonetheless, destroyed any chance of solidarity among the generally disempowered German women; some women identifying as Aryan found satisfaction in abusing the far more disempowered Jewish women, for the divide-and-conquer tactic is a habitual patriarchal strategy. The women willing to collaborate with the Nazi regime acted with the same commitment as the men and for similar reasons, proving that patriarchy benefits from eliminating specific gender barriers as required. ‘The difference was’, Stephenson claims, ‘that men had more opportunity to commit crimes against humanity, given their greater role in the public sphere, including serving in the Wehrmacht. It was when women were given the opportunity that their potential for evil could be judged’ (128). In the specific case of the Nazi regime, men were privileged over women for patriarchal misogynistic reasons, but the gleeful collaboration of some women suggests that if equality is conquered before patriarchy is dismantled, we might see a female Hitler in the future. Had he been born female, Hitler could never have had access to power; indeed, villainy of the scale he practised in the 1930s and 1940s is still gendered male today. Nonetheless, we need to consider the possibility that patriarchy might evolve into a gender-neutral social arrangement, organized around power, in which women participate with the same interest in abuse and domination shown, within limits, by the Nazi women. The possible rise of a female Hitler depends on whether the women who feel entitled to absolute power are sanctioned by their community, as Adolf Hitler was by the German society of his time. It is also necessary to understand that despite sharing the same fundamental approach to power, not all patriarchal tyrants wish to use their might for the same end. Consider what the alliance between Stalin and Hitler could have meant for the world, had they supported the same political cause. Richard Overy concludes that ‘Humanity was mercifully saved from this grim partnership because more divided than united the ambitions of the two men’ (xxxiv), a chilling observation. The post-­ Hitler (and post-Stalin) modern villain is not just threatening a family, a community, or a nation: he is threatening humanity itself. For this reason, it is more important than ever to warn that, as Hitler’s case shows, the root of the problem is the patriarchal obsession with empowerment. The world needs urgently a wholly new social arrangement with a very different understanding of power, capable of stopping potential villains as soon as they show any signs of patriarchal entitlement, but for that men need a wholly new approach to masculinity, offering alternatives far more satisfactory than patriarchy; the acknowledgment that some women also lust for absolute power is urgent as well. Otherwise, we will see another Hitler emerge, sooner or later.

38  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy

Notes 1 Naimark maintains that Stalin’s regime caused a major genocide in the Soviet Union, with possibly more millions of victims than those caused by the Nazis. His use of the word ‘genocide’ instead of ‘mass murder’ remains controversial. 2 Some relevant titles (in English) are: Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream (1972); Beryl Bainbridge, Young Adolf (1978); George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1979); Ron Hansen, Hitler’s Niece (1999); and Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest (2007). 3 The volume published in 2008 condenses the two-volume edition, keeping the main substance without the formidable scholarly apparatus. 4 Swastika Night was rescued from oblivion only in 1985 by Daphne Patai’s edition for The Feminist Press. 5 Triumph des Willens received the prize for Best Foreign Documentary film at the Venice Film Festival of 1935. 6 The Games were also documented by Riefenstahl in Olympia (1938). In Carl Sagan’s novel Contact (1985), the aliens become aware of human civilization when they receive the pioneering TV signal broadcast by the Nazi regime, with Hitler’s opening speech at the Berlin Olympics. 7 Not without resistance. John Heartfield’s satirical 1930s photomontages deconstructed Hitler by presenting him as a villain controlled by capitalism. Regrettably, not only the Nazi political repression but also ‘the Cold War’s systematic erasure of the memory of most anti-fascist artists’ (Hermand 59), who had often sided with Communism, resulted in the neglect of confrontational, subversive anti-Nazi artwork. 8 See also her study Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image. 9 The only recording of Hitler in conversation shows that, in private, he could speak in soft tones completely unlike the vigorous style of the p ­ ublic speeches—or his frequent ranting. In this eleven-minute recording made ­secretly in Finland (in 1942), Hitler can be heard discussing the delicate political situation with the Finnish defence leader, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. The audio is available from www.youtube.com/watch?v= ClR9tcpKZec, accompanied by an English translation. 10 Vanderbilt travelled to Europe, including Germany, in 1933. Chaplin claims that he was the first non-German to describe the Nazi concentration camps, having managed to get inside one. ‘But his stories of degenerate brutality’, Chaplin laments, ‘were so fantastic that few people believed them’ (319). 11 In 1937, English producer Alexander Korda ‘suggested I should do a Hitler story based on mistaken identity, Hitler having the same moustache as the tramp’ (392), Chaplin reminisces. He did not warm up to the idea at first but finally accepted that ‘A Hitler story was an opportunity for burlesque and pantomime’ (392). 12 Chaplin explains that he made the film ‘because Hitler must be laughed at’ (391) and he wanted to mock the Nazi ‘mystic bilge about a pure-blood race’ (392); he grants, however, that he would not have made The Great Dictator ‘Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps’ (391). 13 Apparently, this is how Scotland Yard Inspector Robert Anderson described German-American robber Adam Worth (1844–1902), supposed to be the inspiration for Moriarty (see Macintyre). 14 The SA or Sturmabteilung were the paramilitary branch of the Nazi Party and, as such, instrumental in unleashing the violence that eased Hitler’s access to power. Röhm, a controversial man, was possibly loyal but made himself many enemies. Hitler ordered the SS to eliminate Röhm; following his death, the SA were disbanded and the SS placed in the front lines of the Nazi regime.

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  39

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Bathrick, David. ‘Cinematic Remaskings of Hitler: From Riefenstahl to Chaplin’. Unmasking Hitler: Cultural Representations of Hitler from the Weimar Republic to the Present, Klaus L. Berghahn & Jost Hermand (eds.). Oxford, etc.: Peter Lang, 2005. 147–169. Bauman, Zigmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. London: Polity Press, 1989. Bilbeny, Norbert. El Idiota Moral: La Banalidad del Mal en el Siglo XX. ­Barcelona: Anagrama, 1993. Brownlow, Kevin & Michael Kloft (dir.). The Tramp and the Dictator. London: BBC and Photoplay Productions, 2002. Documentary. Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Burdekin, Katharine. Swastika Night (1937). New York: The Feminist Press, 1985. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). London: Fontana, 1993. Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964. Christensen, Peter. ‘The Political Appeal of Dr. Fu Manchu’. The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, Stacy Gillis & Philippa Gates (eds.). Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2002. 81–89. Cohen, Rich. ‘Becoming Adolf’. Vanity Fair 9 October 2007. www.vanityfair. com/news/2007/11/cohen200711 Conroy, Mike. 500 Comic Book Villains. Hauppauge, NY: Barrons, 2004. Doherty, Thomas. Hollywood and Hitler 1933–1939. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Doneson, Judith E. The Holocaust in American Film. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2002. Doyle, Arthur Conan. ‘The Final Problem’. Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893). www.gutenberg.org/files/834/834-h/834-h.htm#link2H_4_0011 Epping-Jäger, Cornelia. ‘Hitler’s Voice: The Loudspeaker under National Socialism’. Caroline Bern (trans.). Intermédialités 17 (Spring 2011): 83–104. Evans, Richard J. Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Fest, Joachim C. Hitler (1973). Richard Winston & Clara Winston (trans.). London: Penguin, 2002. Frayling, Christopher. The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinophobia. London: Thames and Hudson, 2014. Frye, Roland Mushat. ‘Hitler, Stalin, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Modern Totalitarianism and Ancient Tyranny’. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge 142.1 (March 1998): 81–109. Gellately, Robert. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Goldhagen, Daniel Johan. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technologies of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.

40  Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy Haslam, Alexander S. & Stephen D. Reicher. ‘Questioning the Banality of Evil’. The Psychologist 21.1(January 2008): 16–19. Hermand, Jost. ‘John Heartfield or the Art of Cutting Out Hitler’. Unmasking Hitler: Cultural Representations of Hitler from the Weimar Republic to the Present, Klaus L. Berghahn & Jost Hermand (eds.). Oxford, etc.: Peter Lang, 2005. 59–79. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf (1925–1926). James Murphy (trans.). London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt Holden, Kate. ‘Formations of Discipline and Manliness: Culture, Politics and 1930s Women’s Writing’. Journal of Gender Studies 8.2 (July 1999): 141–157. Horn, Eva. ‘Work on Charisma: Writing Hitler’s Biography’. Joel Golb (trans.). New German Critique 38.3 (Fall 2011): 95–114. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler. London: Allen Lane, 2008. ———. Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and the British Road to War. London: Penguin Books, 2004. ———. The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (1980). O ­ xford: Oxford UP, 2001 (1987). ———. Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis. London: Allen Lane, 2000. ———. Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris. London: Allen Lane, 1998. Koschorke, Albrecht. On Hitler’s Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism. Erik Butler (trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017 (2016). Lara, María Pía. Narrating Evil. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Macintyre, Ben. The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief. New York: Random House, 1998. Miller, Cynthia J. ‘The “B” Movie Goes to War in Hitler, Beast of Berlin (1939)’. Film and History 36.1 (2006): 58–64. Naimark, Norman M. Stalin’s Genocides. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Overy, Richard J. The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928). Laurence Scott (trans., ed.). Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2009. Riall, Lucy. ‘The Shallow End of History? The Substance and Future of Political Biography’. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (Winter 2010): 375–397. Rohmer, Sax. The Drums of Fu Manchu (1939). London: Titan Books, 2014. E-book. ———. The Mystery of Doctor Fu Manchu / The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (1913). www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/173 Schmölders, Claudia. Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image (2000). Adrian Daub (trans.). Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006. ———. ‘The Face that Said Nothing: Physiognomy in Hitlerism’. Unmasking Hitler: Cultural Representations of Hitler from the Weimar Republic to the Present, Klaus L. Berghahn & Jost Hermand (eds.). Oxford, etc.: Peter Lang, 2005. 15–33. Shaw Debra Benita. Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Stephenson, Jill. Women in Nazi Germany. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001. Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Volume 2: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (1977). Stephen Conway (trans.). Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

Hitler: The Threat of Absolute Villainy  41 Trevor-Roper, Hugh. The Last Days of Hitler. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1987. Urwand, Ben. The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2015. Vaget, Hans Rudolf. ‘Wagnerian Self-Fashioning: The Case of Adolf Hitler’. New German Critique 101 (Summer 2007): 95–114. Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology. Berkeley: University of California, 1978. Wieland, Christina. The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of ­M asculinity: A Psychoanalytic Approach. New York: Routledge, 2015.

2 Big Brother and O’Brien The Mystique of Power and the Reproduction of Patriarchal Masculinity

Orwell’s Subtle Satire: Nineteen Eighty-Four Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) presents an oblique yet straightforward image of villainy. A major patriarchal figure, Big Brother, occupies the central space of the system of power which Orwell criticizes, yet he is just an icon and not a living man. Power is more directly embodied by a secondary villain, the torturer O’Brien, even though he lacks the lust for power that characterizes villainy. His function is not to increase but to maintain the amount of power which the regime that he represents already possesses by forcing potential dissidents, like Winston, to embrace Big Brother. O’Brien is, therefore, an extremely useful figure to understand the specific mechanisms of coercion that keep men within the boundaries of patriarchy and that allow this hierarchical social arrangement to perpetuate itself. This is how I read Orwell’s indispensable novel here. Most critics note that there is something anomalous in the tone of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which suggests that Orwell—a very sick man suffering from tuberculosis in the period when he wrote this novel—was not in full control of his writing. The author himself clarified that ‘the book is a satire’ against ‘the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism’; his purpose in writing his novel was to send the message that ‘totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere’ (Collected Essays IV 502, original italics).1 Bernard Crick, a prominent Orwell scholar, reads Nineteen Eighty-Four specifically as a Swiftian satire grounded on the events of the late 1940s, warning that ‘Most bad or partial readings occur through not grasping the context of the time’ (146). Novelist Anthony Burgess also insists, in the extensive study of Nineteen Eighty-Four which precedes his own grimly satirical 1985, that a contextual reading is necessary. He puts in the mouth of a fictional old man interviewed for this study the well-known information that Room 101, where Winston is tortured in Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a room in the basement of BBC’s Broadcasting House, ‘where Orwell used to broadcast propaganda to India’ (25) during WWII. How we

Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique  43 should use this titbit for the purposes of reading Nineteen Eighty-Four as satire is not clarified, unless we assume that Orwell hated the BBC so profoundly that he secretly saw it as the Ministry of Truth. The satirical content of Nineteen Eighty-Four was never obvious, anyway, to the original 1950s readers. The BBC’s broadcast in December 1954 of a play by Nigel Kneale, which adapted Orwell’s novel, elicited a high number of complaints by offended viewers, who found the spectacle too horrific.2 The teleplay led, nonetheless, to ‘a huge boost in the novel’s sales’ (Lea 76), particularly among the less knowledgeable readers who had missed the book when it was published, six years before. Concerned by the ongoing Cold War rather than by past totalitarianism and influenced by the adaptation’s presentation of ‘a bleak, perhaps unavoidable future’ (Lea 74), these new readers mostly interpreted Nineteen Eighty-Four as a terrifying dystopia, the standard reading still today.3

Reformulating George Orwell’s Feminist Interpretations: Focus on Men Aragay claims that Orwell actually failed to project his own view of Nineteen Eighty-Four as satire onto his readers because he could not uphold ‘the aesthetic detachment from his main character that is demanded of satirists’ (71). This failure is particularly visible in the fact that no reader can see Winston ‘as a ridiculous figure’ (71); he is perceived, rather, as a pathetic victim deserving sympathy. Arguably, O’Brien (and not Winston) is the object of ridicule yet the point is equally valid: the torturer is too powerful to elicit laughter at any point. I’ll argue, then, that a problem in any interpretation of Nineteen EightyFour is that Orwell set out to satirize politics but ended up offering a portrait of patriarchal power too stark for satire because it was coloured by personal overtones and gender issues of which he was not fully aware. There is no doubt that, beyond the general political aim of targeting 1940s totalitarianism, both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four spring from the ‘hard lesson, especially about the new political Europe’ (Bowker 226) which Orwell saw first-hand during his time fighting with the POUM (Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista) in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and which resulted in his writing Homage to Catalonia (1938). The fear he felt when Catalan Trotskyites and anarchists started being treated by the USSR as ‘the new heretics’ (Bowker 227) and to be arbitrarily eliminated lies, no doubt, behind Winston’s own fear of an impending arrest and perhaps execution. If we detach, however, this fear from its particular political circumstance, we see that Orwell is specifically addressing the issue of how physical and psychological violence can be used to turn individuals into, using Foucault’s formulation, ‘docile bodies’, the ‘subjected and practised bodies’ which discipline produces (138). This is not the specific strategy of any individual political regime

44  Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique but a patriarchal tactic that criss-crosses the most brutal dictatorships, and a good number of democracies. Diverse critics have highlighted the links between Nineteen EightyFour and other anti-Fascist fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, beyond its most often named predecessors: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924)4 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Orwell was himself a greater admirer of the Russian author. As he wrote in his review of We, in what appears to be a summary of his still unwritten Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘It is this intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—­human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes—that makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s’ (Collected Essays IV 75). Ironically (and his is a judgement I agree with), Varrichio maintains that ‘the world depicted by Huxley is undoubtedly more “advanced” than the one imagined by Orwell, and does not have to resort to torture to correct deviations’ (113). In any case, neither these comments nor the many studies5 tracing the connections between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (which Orwell must have read assuming it had been written by a man, Murray Constantine) discuss how the use of violent coercion connects with gender, even though this is more than obvious in Burdekin’s dystopia. McKay, for instance, prefers highlighting that the two novels are closely linked through the presence of a secret History book in their centre. These two key volumes ‘describe and critique social/political institutions, and so have that additional social/ political significance’ (304). McKay misses a crucial point, though: in Swastika Night the text revealing how Hitlerism is manipulating History is a truthful account, whereas in Nineteen Eighty-Four the book supposedly written by the rebel Emmanuel Goldstein is actually the Party’s fabrication (O’Brien even claims its authorship). In short, Burdekin’s anti-­patriarchal credentials are straightforward, Orwell’s are if not downright dubious, at least ambiguous. The controversy about Orwell’s own patriarchal positioning and his manifest anti-feminism and misogyny erupted, precisely, around the year 1984, with the contributions by feminist scholars to the many publications generated by this emblematic date. What Ivett Császár has called the ‘shadow over the champion of decency’ (in the title of her 2010 article summarizing Orwell’s fall from grace) started growing with the feminist analysis of the women in his fiction. In her article ‘Orwell: Paterfamilias or Big Brother?’ (1984), Beatrix Campbell complained that ‘Women are akin to the proletarian man in Orwell’s work, they are rendered natural rather than skilful, almost infantile in their unconsciousness rather than alert and organised’ (133). In another article in the same volume, ‘Hindrances and Help-Meets: Women in the Writings of George Orwell’, Deirdre Beddoe granted that unlike all the other female characters created by Orwell, at least in Nineteen Eighty-Four Julia ‘shows courage’

Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique  45 (147), though she basically hates the Party because it restricts her right to enjoy herself. Secretly defiant and insubordinate, she is nonetheless ‘totally incapable of understanding the motives which drive Winston to revolt’ (147–148). Thomas Horan defends Julia’s rebellion from the waist downwards, as Winston defines it, on the grounds that sexual desire has ‘a propulsive ability to promote change even when the sexual relationship itself is curtailed’ (314), not only in Nineteen Eighty-Four but also in We and Brave New World. In the specific case of Julia, though, I would go much further than Beddoe to argue that Winston’s desire for O’Brien’s patriarchal validation trumps his sexual desire for Julia, which is why he betrays her. Furthermore, Julia’s function in the novel is to divert Winston’s libido into proper heteronormativity to avoid, for homophobic reasons, any queer liaison between the two men. John Rodden, currently the main Orwell scholar, granted at the end of the 1980s, after the feminist onslaught, that ‘In part the ­“Orwell cult” is a “cult of masculinity”’ for ‘part of his appeal has always been his capacity to make intellectual life seem manly, not effeminate’ (Politics 225, original italics). Nevertheless, more recently, in 2006, Rodden emphasized that Orwell’s evident misogyny and homophobia should not be excused as products of his time, but judged by ‘standards that he himself proclaimed’, bemoaning Orwell’s ‘astonishing blind spots’ for a man with his principles (Every 162). Rodden made in addition the point that since, as men, male homosexuals enjoyed privileges denied to women, Orwell’s misogyny is even less acceptable than his homophobia. Judging which prejudice is worse and to what extent Orwell was a patriarchal man is not, however, wholly productive, particularly if what is highlighted is his misrepresentation of women rather than what Orwell actually says about the relationships between men. Needless to say, paying attention to how Orwell represents men does not mean that the feminist readings devoted to outing misogyny should be abandoned. Quite the opposite: it is essential to avoid undermining the analysis of relevant gender issues, as Orwell’s main feminist critic Daphne Patai has done regarding her own work. In her controversial volume The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology (1984),6 Patai thoroughly dissected Orwell’s ‘commitment to androcentrism’ (19). Twenty years later, however, disappointed with the infighting in academic feminism she claims to have frequently witnessed, Patai declared in her essay ‘Third Thoughts about Orwell’ (2004) that her book should be dismissed as ‘a clear case where I let my feminist politics dictate the results of my analysis’ (203). She is not only being bizarrely unfair to her former efforts but also incurring a dangerous intellectual risk by deauthorizing women’s feminist scholarship, and even any ­antipatriarchal analysis of men’s writing by male scholars. Despite her use of essentialist tenets, Patai’s monograph still reads today as one of the most perceptive approaches to gender in Orwell’s work.

46  Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique She offers a relevant critique of Animal Farm (1946) as a ‘patriarchal fantasy’ (her chapter title), in which gender hierarchy is ‘carefully reproduced’ (205) despite the political message, and in which the ‘barnyard revolution (…) invariably re-creates the institution of patriarchy’, as humans revolutions do (208). Her critique of Nineteen Eighty-Four, to which she boldly applies Game Theory to read how Winston and O’Brien bond, is original and insightful. I do not completely agree with her view that since power lacks moral justification it must be read as a game, but I do agree that power play is a central concept in Nineteen Eighty-Four. I also support Patai’s claim that, since the emotionally repressive regime makes male bonding almost impossible, ‘O’Brien’s devotion to the task of breaking Winston has a psychologically plausible basis: the need for intimacy among men’ (Mystique 224). Patai maintains that Winston engages in the dangerous game of dissidence because he covertly seeks ‘recognition and affirmation from O’Brien, the most powerful man he knows’ (233). The Orwell Mystique, in short, offers the foundation to read their sadomasochistic bromance not as an ‘indictment of how human beings behave but only of how men in a particular tradition have behaved’ (263). The most problematic issue in Patai’s critique is her conclusion that though Orwell ‘could have stripped bare the ideology of masculine supremacy’ (263), this would have destabilized his moral authority, and so, hypocritically, he opted for ‘the easier way of pessimism and d ­ espair’ (263). Patai eventually rejected her own view, attributing instead Orwell’s hopelessness to just ‘a matter of temperament’ (‘Third Thoughts’ 303) and to his personal circumstances. Both positions, the feminist accusation and the subjective justification, are questionable. Orwell faced a conundrum which all male writers face: since masculinity and patriarchy are habitually confused—and since in general men have an even lower awareness of how patriarchy works than women—male writers hardly know how to undermine patriarchy while endorsing masculinity. In the confused discourse of Nineteen Eighty-Four, then, Orwell, like many other men authors, describes his horror of the worst aspects of patriarchy without being able to name it as such and, hence, offer a model of alternative masculinity. This is not due to hypocrisy but to the lack of a clear anti-patriarchal gender agenda. It might be argued that the dictatorship presented in Nineteen EightyFour is gender-neutral since it represses both men and women but this is a naïve position: Big Brother can hardly be imagined as Big Sister, and had Julia been the object of O’Brien’s ominous attentions, the novel would be very different—as it would be if O’Brien were a woman. ­Lonoff writes that ‘O’Brien unmans Winston—in the text’s words, gets inside him—by making him cast off his love and faith’ (39, my italics) and we need to pay attention to how this process of unmanning (not of de-gendering) turns Winston ‘in many ways’ into ‘a product of O’Brien’

Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique  47 (Finigan 456); also, we must examine how ‘the tragedy of Winston’s defeat’ is ‘lessened by the fact that in certain, as yet unspecified respects, he is more like O’Brien than unlike him’ (Resch 157). I am reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, therefore, as a novel in which Orwell tries but fails to resist total patriarchal villainy because he is not himself fully aware of his own gendered subject and critique. This is not surprising, since the theorization of how hegemonic patriarchal masculinity reproduces itself is relatively new and still perplexing. R.W. Connell borrowed the key idea of hegemony from Antonio Gramsci to argue in the 1980s that in the struggle of the diverse masculinities for power, one type (or model) is idealized, thus becoming hegemonic, in other words, dominant and normative. This hegemonic masculinity, ‘the currently most honored way of being a man’, forces ‘all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimate[s] the global subordination of women to men’ (Connell & Messerschmidt 832). This theorization was formulated in the hope that ‘a more humane, less oppressive, means of being a man might become hegemonic’ instead of patriarchal masculinity, ‘as part of a process leading toward an abolition of gender hierarchies’ (833). Winston, I argue, tries blindly to embody this alternative to the Party’s comprehensive patriarchy but he finds that ‘the policing of men as well as the exclusion or discrediting of women’ (Connell & Messerschmidt 844) cannot be resisted. O’Brien, and presumably others like him, will not allow it. For this reason, the torturer cannot be satisfied with punishing Winston: O’Brien must force his victim to accept the values which Big Brother and he himself, as his henchman, represent. In case there are still doubts that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel fundamentally about patriarchy, I’ll note that Anthony Burgess quotes the passage of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1590–1592) in which Petruchio has his finally submissive wife accept that ‘What you will have it nam’d, even that it is, / And so it shall be so for Katherine’ (IV.v, 24–25) in support of his view that ‘The self-willed Winston Smith has to be tamed, and O’Brien is his Petruchio’ (1985 41). While Shakespeare’s own misogyny surfaces in his comedic treatment of Katherine’s submission to patriarchy, Orwell’s novel shows that also men must be forced to accept patriarchal values. O’Brien’s extreme brutality is a sign of how unpersuasive patriarchal indoctrination is. By making this apparent, Orwell offers hope for resistance against villainy, whether we read Nineteen Eighty-Four as satire or as tragic dystopia.

Big Brother: The Iconic Villain In Orwell’s novel, ‘Hierarchy destroys fraternity’ (Crick 149) and so Big Brother is constantly watching over Oceania’s citizens not ‘as a brother should’ but as an all-seeing tyrant (149). Crick reads this Orwellian

48  Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique inversion as part of how ‘Satires turn moral truths upside down’ (149). There seems to be, however, little comedy in the construction of the Party’s iconic figure—unless, that is, Anthony Burgess is, once more, right and we need to read Big Brother in context. Whereas most critics tend to see Oceania’s head of the state as ‘an amalgam of Stalin and Kitchener’ (Meyers 141), Burgess’s already quoted fictional old informer points out that Orwell’s dictator looks like the man in the popular ­newspaper advertisements of the real-life Bennett Correspondence College: ‘You had a picture of Bennett père, a nice old man, shrewd but benevolent, saying, “Let me be your father”. Then Bennett fils came along, taking over the business, a very brutal-looking individual, saying: “LET ME BE YOUR BIG BROTHER”’ (1985 21–22, original capitalized text).7 Real-life totalitarian dictators made a proficient use of the new media and marketing techniques of the 1920s and 1930s to build the personality cults required to sustain their power. Hitler’s face became iconic, as I have explained, to the point that after gazing at the photo included in the Hurst and Blackett translation of Mein Kampf which he reviewed, Orwell concluded that ‘The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him’ (Collected Essays II 13). Hitler’s ‘pathetic, dog-like face’, Orwell wrote, is ‘the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs’ (13, my italics) and, as such, a face that inspires sympathy, though of a distant kind. Instead of the mythical image which Hitler exploited (and that Burdekin mocks in Swastika Night as a complete fake), Orwell’s Big Brother is intended to be an avuncular figure, in the style, as Bound points out, of self-styled Uncle Joe Stalin in the Soviet Union. Dictatorial regimes often present tyrants as approachable family members so that ‘the powerful feelings of loyalty which exist naturally in family life are ultimately directed outwards for the benefit of the state’ (Bounds 146). Of course, Big Brother’s ubiquity and capacity to maintain total surveillance also connect with God. Gottlieb considers Big Brother’s ‘hypnotic gaze (…) a parody of this concept’ (57) but, whether we read Orwell’s icon as human or as divine, the principle is the same one: Big Brother is, literally, patriarchy’s poster boy. A particularity of Orwell’s representation of villainy is that, unlike what happens in Zamyatin’s We, the central figure in the regime is never seen in the flesh. The leader of One State, known as the Benefactor, mixes ‘traits of Vladimir Lenin and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor’ (Brown xxi) which Zamyatin’s Russian target readership would recognize. The Benefactor is present during a public celebration looking ‘dead still, like something made out of metal’ (We 46). Seen at a distance because of the huge crowds, ‘the face is hard to make out. All you can see is that the features are limited to strict, solemn, square lines’ (46); his ‘huge’, heavy hands are highlighted. Benefactors are elected yearly by public acclaim and the current incumbent has won forty-eight times, which is possibly Zamyatin’s way of saying that what matters is not who occupies the

Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique  49 position but that someone does. The Benefactor’s limited description, or perhaps Burdekin’s long-dead, deified Hitler, may have inspired Orwell to represent Big Brother as an absent yet omnipresent villain. Just as Nazi Germany relied on the (mythical) infallibility of the Führer, Winston Smith’s Ingsoc-controlled Oceania considers Big Brother ‘omnipotent’ and the Party ‘infallible’ (Nineteen Eighty-Four 221). Since, as the Germans discovered after the Stalingrad debacle, no leader is infallible, the Party is forced to constantly manipulate historical documentation to erase the traces of past mistakes (in what is called a blackwhite process). Any deviation from the official truth, any doubt, would weaken the regime and cause it to start disintegrating. The past, as Winston knows because it is his job to alter it, is the Party’s interested construction. As he later learns from O’Brien, Inner Party members, who understand the lies on which the system is based, train themselves into acquiring doublethink, the mental skill to accept as true two incompatible views. Indeed, Winston’s belief in the existence of Big Brother, even though he himself contributes to producing his fake speeches, is an example of classic doublethink. When he asks O’Brien in the middle of his horrendous torture whether Big Brother exists, the only possible answer is the one his tormentor gives: ‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party’ (272). O’Brien does not use ‘embodiment’ in the sense of possessing a body but of incarnating a set of beliefs. Since he is not a living person, Big Brother cannot die. Big Brother’s face, ‘full of power and mysterious calm’ (18), is a central aspect of the Party’s iconography and ideology. The icon is aimed at attracting individuals to ensure their loyalty but also to impress Party members with the idea that they can hide nothing from their leader. As Winston muses, not only is this face ubiquitous but so is the surveillance of the ever-watching eyes and the sound of the pervasive voice. A point that is never clarified is who has lent his face to Big Brother, whether there was once a living man behind that identity who carried out to the bitter end his sense of entitlement to power. Patai’s incidental comment stirs the bizarre suspicion that O’Brien himself is the man on whom Big Brother has been modelled: as she notes, ‘we encounter no one more powerful than O’Brien—except the mythical Big Brother himself (who is, incidentally, portrayed as of the same physical type)’ (Mystique 230). Alternatively, both O’Brien and Big Brother may simply have the kind of looks preferred in Ingsoc society. The face that dominates Oceania is that ‘of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features’ (Nineteen Eighty-Four 3, my italics). His dark eyes dominate the strategic corners where the posters are placed; his is not, however, a threatening face but the visage of a ‘fearless protector’ (17) guarding Oceania from its enemies. Among them, Emmanuel Goldstein—the Enemy of the People, the betrayer—occupies a most prominent position, though his existence is

50  Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique as improbable as that of Big Brother. The dictator is described in the subversive book which Goldstein himself is supposed to have penned, The Theory and Practise of Oligarchical Collectivism, as the Party’s public image: ‘His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organisation’ (217). Obviously, Goldstein’s matching, opposite function is attracting all negative feelings as the villain’s villain. Winston feels during the daily Two-Minute Hatred sessions devoted to expressing loathing for Goldstein that the man ‘seemed like some sinister enchanter’ (17, my italics), the owner of a mighty voice that could extinguish civilization itself. Whereas Big Brother is handsome (and so is O’Brien), Goldstein possesses a ‘lean Jewish face’ which looks ‘clever’ but ‘somehow inherently despicable’ (14, my italics). Goldstein’s face and voice have ‘a sheep-like quality’ (14). The anti-Semitic, animal overtones suggest that Goldstein’s face has been designed for a specific purpose and implicitly hint that Big Brother’s appearance is, likewise, a product of the Inner Party’s think tank. As Goldstein’s book expounds, in Nineteen Eighty-Four planet Earth is divided into three heavily militarized powers, which are obviously patriarchal in their use of violence and terror to submit all human beings. The borders are unstable but, essentially, Eurasia, as its name indicates, occupies the lands ‘from Portugal to the Bering Strait’ (193). The British Isles are, however, part of Oceania, to which the whole continent of America, Australasia, and southern Africa also belong. The smallest domain, Eastasia, consists of China, the countries of Southeast Asia, Japan, and ‘a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet’ (193). These three super-powers have been waging war on each other constantly for twenty-five years in a continuous low intensity conflict which can never end in victory since their weaponry, including nuclear bombs, is evenly balanced. As the Party slogan claims, War is Peace. The three powers, therefore, have developed a war economy aimed at creating a constant scarcity while keeping consumption at the basic level necessary for production and full employment to function. The xenophobia instigated by the three regimes keeps citizens in a constant state of ignorance; they don’t know that, as Goldstein claims, these three ‘super-states’ (205) are quite similar. Each regime has a ‘prevailing philosophy’ (205): Ingsoc (a descendant of English Socialism) in Oceania; Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia and Death-Worship—or ‘Obliteration of the Self’ (205)—in Eastasia. The three ideologies share, however, a basic patriarchal structure, though Orwell, once again, does not name it as such: ‘Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare’ (205, my italics). The rulers of each land are tyrants more powerful than any other dictator could ever be.

Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique  51 The paradox, though, is that the actual rulers are not the individual leaders but the systems which they represent, for presumably there is a Big Brother in each territorial division and an all-mighty Party. It can even be argued that Nineteen Eighty-Four presents the most formidable case of fictional collective villainy since no corner of Earth lives in freedom. At the same time, who embodies power in public matters much less than who upholds power behind the scenes, which is why O’Brien is a far more terrifying figure than Big Brother. With this sinister character Orwell suggests, wittingly or unwittingly, that the presence of a central, tyrannical male figure in any dictatorial regime is less important than the men endorsing his power, who remain loyal for purely selfish reasons. O’Brien does not torture Winston into loving Big Brother because he himself loves this empty icon; rather, he exploits his victim’s compulsory feelings to maintain his own advantaged position. Patriarchy does not work, then, on the basis of obedience to a single figure—God, king, dictator or father—but on the basis of submission to those who maintain the patriarch in power for their own ends, namely, to enjoy privilege.

O’Brien: Power, Privilege, and the Inner Party When Winston reads Goldstein’s volume, he finally understands ‘how’ but not yet ‘why’ (226). The answer is provided, once more, by his torturer: the Party is ‘interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power’ (276, original italics). This emphasis on total supremacy, makes the Party unlike past oligarchies, ‘in that we know what we are doing’ (276). Hannah Arendt argues that totalitarianism is belligerent because it aims at making ‘the world consistent’ in order to demonstrate that its stance is correct (Origins 458). This ‘complete consistency’ requires, she adds, ‘totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity’ (458). Both the Party and O’Brien appear to follow this model, though at the same time the urge to turn the community into a homogeneous entity is discernible in many other systems of power. This is easy to explain, for patriarchy (the upholding of power for power’s sake) is behind all of them, even current democracy. When the three authoritarian world systems were consolidated in Orwell’s alternative 1940s, they did so with the ‘conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality’ (211, original italics). They used the habitual repressive techniques of their 1930s predecessors, the same ones used in all 20th- and 21st-centuries disciplinarian regimes. Eurasia, Oceania, and Eastasia differed in points of doctrine but the three regimes wished ‘to arrest progress and freeze history’ (211), in order to create a perpetual, self-renewing machinery of power run by its privileged members, their inner circles or Inner Party. Goldstein (or perhaps indeed O’Brien) explains that the foundation of Ingsoc is its constitution as a collective oligarchy with no private

52  Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique personal property, except for a few belongings, since ‘Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly’ (214). The numbers may be part of Orwell’s satirical spirit, though they are at the same time not so different from the figures for ultra-capitalist nations like the United States. Oceania’s society consists of about 300 million individuals, of whom 85% are ‘proles’ (250 million), 11% Outer Party members like Winston and Julia (33 million), and only 2% (6 million) Inner Party members. If the Outer Party is the hands of the system, the Inner Party is the brain (also the disciplinarian whip). Big Brother sits at the tip of the pyramid, giving it patriarchal coherence. There are also, by the way, slaves in the equatorial territories that continually shift hands depending on the vagaries of war but are not important enough to be occupied for long. The oligarchy of the Inner Party, the ‘new aristocracy’ (213), emerged from the ranks of the individuals employed in manufacturing and in the civil service. These 20th post-civil war ‘bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians’ were crucially different from similar individuals in the past because they had no interest in possessions. They were, instead, ‘hungrier for pure power’ (213, my italics) and fully aware of the strategy required to destroy any resistance.8 Once they established their hierarchical rule, they next developed a mechanism of self-perpetuation on the basis of meritocracy; prospective Party members are selected by means of an examination which they take aged sixteen. This also allows the Inner Party to shed its less promising members and to appease the lust for power of the Outer Party by welcoming its most ambitious individuals. The proles are, however, firmly excluded. Those who show greater promise and might thus ‘possibly become nuclei of discontent’ (218) are targeted by the Thought Police and executed. The Party functions, then, in a way that recalls an ‘adoptive organization’ (218), capable of surviving for centuries, like the Catholic Church or similar patriarchal structures. ‘Who wields power is not important’, Goldstein’s book proclaims, ‘provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same’ (218, my italics). The Party is so invested in its own perpetuation that it has even abolished all kinds of racial discrimination, recruiting its upper echelons from the local populations after abolishing in practice colonization. This does not mean, however, that other forms of patriarchal prejudice do not exist. Presumably, women Party members have the same duties as their male counterparts (there is no question of ‘rights’ in this context), but Nineteen Eighty-Four is, all the same, a heteronormative, androcentric dark fable. ‘All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived’ (219), and the same can be said about patriarchy

Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique  53 today. Although Orwell appears to be using male pronouns in a gender-­ comprehensive fashion, the constant use of ‘he’ to refer to the typical Party member also ends up highlighting the patriarchal foundation of its ideology. In this scheme, O’Brien’s function is to detect any disaffection that might endanger the supremacy of the Inner Party circle to which he belongs and threaten its privileged hold on power. In Carr’s view, O’Brien ‘lives to torture and to prey upon those poor souls in the Outer Party that he can entice into thought crime’ (117). This, however, supposes that without O’Brien’s intervention Winston would harbour no feelings of doubt, a reading which appears to contradict what does happen in the novel. In fact, there are grounds to argue that Orwell had in mind for O’Brien a character in Zamyatin’s We known as S-4711. The protagonist, engineer D-503, notices with mounting anxiety that he is being shadowed by this oddly smiling member of the Bureau of Guardians. To his surprise, S-4711 turns out to be a member of the Melphi, the resistance opposing the Benefactor. Instead of torture, the State uses a surgical procedure to deprive D-503 of his imagination, after which he duly reports the conspirators to the Bureau. Zamyatin’s ending offers a glimmer of hope but it is to be assumed that S-4711 is executed together with his fellow rebels. Orwell reverses S-4711’s subversive function, turning him into an ultra-orthodox defender of the Party, though he risks in the process the plausibility of his characterization. Famously, Pittock claimed that the society which Orwell imagined ‘can never exist because its rulers have the kind of powers traditionally attributed to demons’ (145). This does not mean that ‘Orwell consciously set out to give the regime demonic powers’ (146) but that there is something inhuman always lurking beyond the understanding of author and readers. Beyond the possible Gothic overtones—Elsbree argues that ‘the supreme achievement of the state, is the creation of a zombie who cannot even have unpleasant dreams’ (141)—critics have questioned O’Brien’s complete fearlessness. This is not just a matter of whether his ill-­treatment of Winston is insane but an issue that affects the very fabric of the novel, for ‘a totalitarian state dominated by lunatics or even sadists (…) would be highly unstable’ (Posner 24). In contrast, Richard Rorty has praised Orwell for persuading his readers that O’Brien is ‘indeed, possible’ (176). Rorty, however, typically characterizes O’Brien as a sophisticated sadist taking pleasure in ‘the rich, complicated, delicate, absorbing spectacle of mental pain which Winston would eventually provide’ (179), rather than as the guardian of a brutal patriarchal structure of power. Rorty stresses the personal above the political because, for him, only the promise of pleasure explains the long seven years which O’Brien spends watching Winston. His ‘patient entrapment of Winston’ (­Dilworth 303, my italics) is puzzling if we consider Winston’s scarce ­i mportance in the rigid scheme of his society. Yet, what generates

54  Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique the discomfort which often leads to complaints against ‘narrative improbabilities’ (Dilworth 297) is the homoerotic current binding Winston to his torturer. There is no need to invoke ‘the effects of subliminal suggestions communicated by means of two-way telescreens’ (Dilworth 304) or of hypnotism to justify the rapport between the two men. Nor is it necessary to bring repressed homosexuality into the equation, though in a sense it is true that Winston’s bonding with O’Brien ‘verges on sexcrime’ (Meyers 142). Rather, O’Brien has learned to exploit what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called ‘male homosocial desire’ (2) or homoeroticism: the craving for intimacy emerging from the ‘continuum between homosocial and homosexual’ (2). Patriarchal homophobia has ‘radically disrupted’ (Sedgwick 2) the visibility of this continuum, which is why conservative heterosexual men—like Orwell—are bound to deny the obvious: O’Brien’s does use his personal attractive to lure disaffected men like Winston back into submission. It is his job to catch the eye of those who waver during the Two-Minute Hatred sessions, generate a false sense of intimacy that lowers their carefully built mental defences, and trap them with the promise of a collaboration in the fabled rebellious Brotherhood led by Goldstein. Once his victims are thus seduced, O’Brien proceeds to finally establish a physical relationship with them: he has them arrested, oversees the process of torture, corrects their vision of reality, and either disappears them or, as happens in Winston’s case, returns them to society once re-educated. Goldstein explains that Party members should feel ‘no private emotions’ (220) but O’Brien perfectly understands how personal feeling works, at least sufficiently to attract Winston. The ‘equivocal glance’ that the two men exchange becomes ‘a memorable event, in the locked loneliness’ (20) in which Winston lives. Many critics have highlighted as particularly problematic the dream Winston has around the time when O’Brien starts his surveillance, in which a man announces to him, apparently using O’Brien’s voice, that ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness’ (27, original italics). Unless we accept that telescreens can induce a hypnagogic state, we should assume that O’Brien’s apparently casual glance activates a dormant ‘link of understanding’ (27) simply because Winston is terribly lonely (as Patai suggested with her observations about the lack of intimacy). It is certainly quite comical, in any case, that their bond takes seven long years to take shape. Winston grants to himself that he feels ‘deeply drawn’ (12, my italics) towards O’Brien because he is curious about how his ‘urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique’ (12) clash. He feels, in addition, that this man’s ‘political orthodoxy was not perfect’ (12) because his intelligent facial expression ‘suggested it irresistibly’ (12). O’Brien’s manly face constantly appears in Winston’s imagination while he writes his secret diary, which he eventually regards as a long letter shaped by its implicit

Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique  55 addressee. Not even Julia, who prides herself on being a good reader of faces, seems surprised by ‘the strange intimacy’ (159) that Winston claims to exist between him and O’Brien, when she witnesses it firsthand in their visit together to O’Brien’s apartment. In many senses, Nineteen Eighty-Four reads as a classic narrative of a man’s middle-age sexual crisis. Winston is thirty-nine, unattractive, plagued by varicose veins and other ailments yet he is chosen by a sexy, pretty, uninhibited twenty-six-year-old girl to be her lover. Julia seduces Winston with the simple trick of a love note, which magically dispels his fantasy of raping her, fuelled by his supposition that she will never correspond his desire. Nevertheless, the pathetic sexual rebellion which the lovers are permitted to stage (while O’Brien monitors all the steps in the liaison) is for Winston never as important as the patriarchal bond he establishes with O’Brien. Using as an excuse the new edition of the Newspeak Dictionary that, as Winston knows, has possibly claimed the life of his disbelieving colleague Syme, O’Brien invites Winston to his home. When he visits O’Brien’s lair with Julia, Winston is so excited that he fears he will be rendered speechless. As the luxury apartment discloses, Inner Party members enjoy the privileges of the very rich and can even silence their telescreen; Winston finds the place ‘intimidating’ (175), the effect O’Brien aims at. He cynically spins to the credulous Winston a colossal web of lies: Goldstein and the Brotherhood exist, he and Julia are welcome as members but might have to sacrifice it all, perhaps even love. Winston’s delusional infatuation is so profound that he tragically misreads what not even a performer as skilled as O’Brien can hide: he exudes ‘strength’ and ‘confidence’ but barely conceals ‘an understanding tinged by irony’ (182). It is only too easy to imagine O’Brien’s villainous laughter when the befuddled couple leave, and his amusement at how gullible they are. A detail often missed is that Winston himself tells O’Brien about the room over Mr Charrington’s shop. When the couple starts meeting there for illicit sex, they place their lives directly in O’Brien’s hands, as he expects. The Ministry of Love, where Winston and Julia are taken after their arrest, and not the luxury apartment, is this villain’s true lair. The scene when O’Brien turns up to start overseeing Winston’s torture offers another comically sinister moment. Winston is so shocked that he misreads O’Brien’s presence: ‘They’ve got you too!’ he cried. ‘They got me a long time ago’, said O’Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony. (250) O’Brien’s task as torturer relies on a basic principle of villainy: physical pain, Winston thinks as the first blows fall, is the worst experience an individual can suffer, for ‘In the face of pain there are no heroes’

56  Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique (251). The beatings and the interrogations continue without remission for weeks, with O’Brien watching the torturers work on, possibly indifferent to the spectacle of Winston’s gradual capitulation. Like many desperate victims of torture, Winston is confused about the role of his victimizer, who appears to be ‘tormentor’, ‘protector’, ‘inquisitor’, and ‘friend’ in one (256). Winston can only shake off this confusion when a brief, lucid respite from the intense pain allows him to perceive the ‘lunatic intensity’ (265) in O’Brien’s face, which suddenly looks ‘­hideously ugly’ (265). O’Brien is possibly incapable, like most fanatics, of explaining his personal motivations but he abuses his literally captive audience not only with pain but also with his own view of the Party. Speaking in the third person but most likely describing his own villainous position, O’Brien gleefully declares that the Party slogan Freedom is Slavery can be reversed if an individual totally submits and denies his own identity; as part of the Party, ‘then he is all-powerful and immortal’ (276). Power, he specifies, is ‘power over human beings’ (276), body and mind, and this can only be conquered by ‘inflicting pain and humiliation’ (279). O’Brien claims that the world he is contributing to create is the reverse ‘of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. (…) Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain’ (279, original uppercase). The Party’s utopia is, like Hitler’s and Stalin’s, ‘founded upon hatred’ (280). It aims at destroying all positive human emotions including those attached to sex—‘We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now’ (280)—so that only the love of Big Brother will exist, together with ‘the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler’ (281, my italics). This world of terror and intolerance has already learned from the errors of the Inquisition, Nazism, and Stalinism. It will tolerate no martyrs; on the contrary, individuals like Winston will offer only ‘true’ confessions (266) and will eventually give in of their own ‘free will’ (267), O’Brien warns. Winston is torn ­between his admiration for how O’Brien uses his brilliant rhetorical skills to articulate these grisly, absurd arguments and his final rational understanding that his deranged torturer ‘believes every word he says’ (281). Deeply distraught, Winston concludes that he himself must be crazy. The final torture which O’Brien inflicts on Winston, threatening to have a rat eat his face, is horrifying but at the same time it is the kind of excess that belongs in pulp fiction and not in an ambitious political novel. Winston’s physical and psychological terror is supposed to erase his love for Julia, as O’Brien wants, and transfer those feelings to Big Brother, yet here O’Brien appears to behave like a second-rate villain in cheap melodrama. The grotesquery is particularly manifest if we think of how elegantly the suave Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller for the Western World, tells the rebellious John in Brave New World that

Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique  57 ‘I make the laws here, I can also break them’ (179), with no need for violence. Either Orwell’s imagination failed him, or this is an intended effect, for the black humour (which is not the same as controlled satire) continues in the final chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston is released, finding himself free to do as he pleases: ‘no whistle woke him, no telescreen admonished him’ (307). He has also a new job at the Ministry of Truth, in a ‘sub-committee of a sub-committee’ (307) connected with the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. Physically fit, after a surprising recovery from the intense torture, he is nonetheless an alcoholic wreck. The mystery of why he was singled out for persecution by O’Brien is left unsolved. Can, then, the villain O’Brien and the villainous patriarchal system represented by Big Brother claim victory over Winston? Certainly, O’Brien’s personal fanaticism and sadism must have found satisfaction in his humiliation. Raymond Williams worried that Orwell, ‘always an opponent of privilege and power’, offers in Nineteen Eighty-Four a story of submission that disrespects those who ‘work for human dignity, freedom and peace’ (126). Readers, however, are taught an ambiguous lesson: the system of command over the Outer Party chosen by the ultra-­patriarchal Inner Party, based on psychological terror and physical pain, is crude and barbaric. Violence is a most effective tool for domination and, as Orwell shows through O’Brien, it might be used to reinforce power for power’s sake beyond any specific ideology, except the self-­interest of those in the privileged oligarchy. Violence, however, is never as convincing as polished rhetoric and always ends up generating grievances and resistance. O’Brien’s task as seducer and torturer is, therefore, part of the Inner Party’s weakness, not strength. If his villainous discourse were truly effective, he could have persuaded Winston, already predisposed to listen to him for his own homoerotic reasons, to embrace the cause and even feel satisfied with his position in the Outer Party. That O’Brien needs to use so much violence shows that Big Brother’s patriarchal dominance is only that of the bully. Perhaps this is, after all, Orwell’s main point: bullies may rule, as they do, and we may even love Big Brother, but this is all the patriarchal, oligarchical system of power can offer. Both O’Brien and Winston are, then, an example of how ‘The individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is an effect, it is the element of its articulation’ (Foucault ‘Two Lectures’ 98). However, this is not so absolute in fiction: Winston ‘abandons his defence of objective truth, but that is not to say that the novel does’ (Dwan 390). In this reading, then, Orwell does not give in to pessimism, as Patai claimed, but to optimism since, hopefully, readers can see that O’Brien’s own doublethink—for he does know that the truth which the Party is building is unsustainable—is a sign of vulnerability. Winston cannot resist O’Brien’s siren’s song, but Orwell’s cautionary tale offers

58  Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique the implicit warning that, ideally, other men will be less susceptible to its allure. Their resistance might break the chain of transmission keeping patriarchy alive, though it might take an impossibly heroic stance to endure its vicious strategy of repression.

Notes 1 The passage (in text no. 158) is an extract from a lost letter to Francis A. Henson, of the United Automobile Workers, dated 16 June 1949. According to the editors, parts of this letter appeared in Life (25 July 1949) and the New York Times Book Review (31 July 1949). 2 Kneale’s teleplay can be seen on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba 4J6umbbp0 3 The satirical reading resurfaced in Terry Gilliam’s bizarre film adaptation Brazil (1985), in which the sprawling, inefficient bureaucracy is the main target of comedy. This is completely different from Michael Radford’s 1984 (1984), a faithful version which follows the reading of Orwell’s novel as tragedy. 4 We was completed in its original Russian version in 1921 but banned by Soviet censors before publication. Zamiatin’s novel was first published in Gregory Zilboorg’s English translation (New York: Dutton, 1924), after being smuggled out of Russia by the author himself in 1923 (Brown xi). 5 Bonifas argues that it is ‘at least very plausible’ (59) that Orwell had read Swastika Night whereas Croft is more interested in arguing that 1984 is not as original, or relevant, as it is assumed if compared with the large body of anti-Fascist fiction published in Britain (210). See also MacKay and Rose for the connections of Nineteen Eighty-Four with other contemporaneous novels. 6 This publication preceded, incidentally, Patai’s discovery that Murray Constantine was Katherine Burdekin’s penname, which led to her editing Swastika Night for the 1985 re-issue. 7 Burgess might be right. See the ads he alludes to in Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History (www.gracesguide.co.uk/Bennett_College). The slogan ‘Let Me Be Your Father’ appears first in a 1929 leaflet, the slogan ‘Let Me Be Your Brother’ in 1934. 8 Orwell had expressed his misgivings about the power-hungry pro-­Communist Russophiles abundant in English intellectual circles in an essay (published in 1946 as a pamphlet) expanding on his review of American author James ­Burham’s The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (1941). He reads another of Burnham’s books, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943), in relation to the secret hopes of the British pro-­Communists in managerial positions: they expect ‘to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip’ (Collected Essays IV 179). Presumably, this is the inspiration for O’Brien.

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Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique  59 Beddoe, Deirdre. ‘Hindrances and Help-Meets: Women in the Writings of George Orwell’. Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, Christopher Norris (ed.). London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984. 139–154. Bonifas, Gilbert. ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four and Swastika Night’. Notes and Queries 34.1 (March 1987): 59. Bounds, Philip. Orwell & Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Bowker, Gordon. Inside George Orwell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Brown, Clarence. ‘Introduction’. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Clarence Brown (trans.). London: Penguin, 1993. Xi–xxvi. Burgess, Anthony. 1985. London: Arrow Books, 1981 (1978). Campbell, Beatrix. ‘Orwell: Paterfamilias or Big Brother?’ Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, Christopher Norris (ed.). London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984. 126–138. Carr, Craig L. Orwell, Politics and Power. London and New York: Continuum, 2010. Connell, R.W. & James W. Messerschmidt. ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’. Gender & Society 19.6 (December 2005): 829–859. Crick, Bernard. ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four: Context and Controversy’. The ­C ambridge Companion to George Orwell, John Rodden (ed.). Cambridge: ­Cambridge UP, 2007. 146–159. Croft, Andy. ‘Worlds without End Foisted Upon the Future—Some Antecedents of Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, Christopher Norris (ed.). London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984. 183–216. Császár, Ivett. ‘Orwell and Women’s Issues—A Shadow over the Champion of Decency’. Eger Journal of English Studies X (2010): 39–56. Dilworth, Thomas. ‘Erotic Dream to Nightmare: Ominous Problems and Subliminal Suggestion in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Papers on Language and Literature 49.3 (Summer 2013): 296–326. Dwan, David. ‘Truth and Freedom in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Philosophy and Literature 34.2 (October 2010): 381–393. Elsbree, Langdon. ‘The Structured Nightmare of 1984’. Twentieth Century ­Literature 5 (October 1959): 135–141. Finigan, Theo. ‘“Into the Memory Hole”: Totalitarianism and Mal d’Archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale’. Science Fiction Studies 38.3 (November 2011): 435–459. Gottlieb, Erika. ‘The Demonic World of Oceania: The Mystical Adulation of the “Sacred” Leader’. George Orwell’s 1984, Harold Bloom (ed.). New York: Chelsea House, 2007. 51–70. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). Alan Sheridan (trans.). London: Penguin, 1991 (1977). ———. ‘Two Lectures’. Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino (trans.). ­Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge—Selected Interviews and Other ­Writings 1972–1977, Colin Gordon (ed.). New York: Pantheon Books: 1980 (1976). 79–108. Horan, Thomas. ‘Revolutions from the Waist Downwards: Desire as Rebellion in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World’. Extrapolation 48.2 (Summer 2007): 314–339. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (1932). London: Longman, 2001.

60  Big Brother and O’Brien: Power’s Mystique Lea, Daniel. ‘Horror Comics and Highbrow Sadism: Televising George Orwell in the 1950s’. Literature and History 19.1 (Spring 2010): 65–79. Lonoff, Sue. ‘Composing Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Art of Nightmare’. George Orwell’s 1984, Harold Bloom (ed.). New York: Chelsea House, 2007. 31–50. MacKay, Marina. ‘Anti-State Fantasy and the Fiction of the 1940s’. Literature and History 24.1 (Spring 2015): 27–40. McKay, George. ‘Metapropaganda: Self-Reading Dystopian Fiction: Burdekin’s Swastika Night and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Science Fiction Studies 21.3 (November 1994): 301–314. Meyers, Jeffrey. Orwell: Life and Art. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. ———. ‘Letter to Francis A. Henson (extract)’ (1949). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus, (eds.). Vol. IV In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950. London: Penguin Books, 1968. 502. ———. ‘Review of Mein Kampf’ (1940). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus (eds.). Vol. II My Country Right or Left 1940–1943. London: Penguin, 1968. 12–14. ———. Homage to Catalonia (1938). London: Penguin, 1989. Patai, Daphne. ‘Third Thoughts about Orwell’. George Orwell: Into the Twenty-­ first Century, Thomas Cushman & John Rodden (eds.). Boulder, CO: ­Paradigm, 2004. 200–213. ———. The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology. Amherst: U of ­Massachusetts P, 1984. Pittock, Malcolm. ‘The Hell of Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Essays in Criticism 47.2 (April 1997): 143–164. Posner, Richard A. ‘Orwell versus Huxley: Economics, Technology, Privacy, and Satire’. Philosophy and Literature 24.1 (April 2000): 1–33. Resch, Robert Paul. ‘Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Boundary 2 24.1 (Spring 1997): 137–176. Rodden, John. Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary ­Siblings. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2006. ———. The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St George’ Orwell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Rorty, Richard. ‘Chapter 8. The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty’. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989. 169–188. Rose, Jonathan. ‘The Invisible Sources of Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Journal of Popular Culture 26.1 (Summer 1992): 93–107. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky. Between Men: English Literature and Men Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Varricchio, Mario. ‘Power of Images/Images of Power in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Utopian Studies 10.1 (1999): 98–114. Williams, Raymond. Orwell. London: Flamingo, 1971. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We (1921). Clarence Brown (trans.) (1924). London: ­Penguin, 1993.

3 Morgoth and Sauron The Problem of Recurring Villainy

J.R.R. Tolkien and the Problem of Evil: A Gendered Approach ‘In a sense’, Holly Crocker observes, ‘to speak of masculinity in The Lord of the Rings is ridiculous, since Men are just one group among an assortment of kind, including Hobbits, Elves, and Dwarves’ (111, original italics). Her comment raises the issue of whether we should address maleness rather than masculinity when exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium, given that most of the main characters are male though not necessarily men. His two formidable villains, Melkor (initially named Melko but later Morgoth) and Sauron, are non-human supernatural beings akin to angels or demons. Since, however, Tolkien uses in their characterization and that of all his other male characters traits clearly connected with human masculinity, I read them essentially as men, regardless of their kind (or species). Readers who are only familiar with The Lord of the Rings (1954– 1955), or its highly successful film adaptation by Peter Jackson (2001– 2003),1 have just a partial view of villainy in Tolkien’s mythology. Sauron, reduced to the roving eye constantly on the lookout for his lost Ring of Power, is a mere shadow of the full-bodied, awe-inspiring figure which he cuts in The Silmarillion (1977). Even so, Sauron himself is a far less original villain than his former master Melkor/Morgoth, a generally little-known character probably because of the daunting task that reading the ponderous, pseudo-Biblical prose of The Silmarillion is for many readers. Arguably, and begging the pardon of his many admirers, Tolkien was a better mythmaker than prose writer. He was also a magnificently disperse author (or, as it is often said, a niggling perfectionist), which is why readers worldwide must thank his beloved youngest son Christopher for the superb editorial task that he has carried out in trying to organize coherently his father’s texts and their almost infinite versions. 2 Properly speaking, The Silmarillion, which Christopher published in 1977, four years after Tolkien’s death, should be approached as a collaboration, though this should by no means affect the high reputation of its ambitious original author.

62  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy The texts we know as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion interlock in ways too complex for me to address here. For my purposes, it suffices to note that though Tolkien could not recall ‘a time when I was not building it’ (Letters 143), he started composing his legendarium in 1914, aged twenty-two. His ambition to write a purely English mythology in a style similar to the Nordic legends that he knew so well, in part through the work as translator and novelist of William Morris, 3 and his passion for philology (the foundation of his long academic career), led Tolkien to invent imaginary languages, beginning with the Finnish-inspired Quenya in 1915. As the languages grew, so did the cultures which he imagined for them in a process of intense, almost mystical, world-building: ‘always’, he wrote, ‘I had the sense of recording what was already “there”, somewhere: not of “inventing”’ (Letters 145). Tolkien’s imaginary universe—which first reached readers in 1937 with The Hobbit, a young adult novel based on stories he told his four children—extends thousands of years back, along the Four Ages until reaching primal creation, and forward, long after Sauron’s defeat. Tolkien in fact intended The Silmarillion and TLOR to be published as a single work, a feat no publisher of the time could assume, much more so considering the provisional nature of the texts in the former book. He accepted only reluctantly the splitting down of TLOR into three volumes—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King—as an unavoidable imposition in view of the considerable length of his text and the cost of producing a single volume. Tolkien never saw, however, TLOR as a trilogy or as a work independent from The Silmarillion and The Hobbit, and this is how they should be understood. Sauron occupies a very marginal position in The Hobbit as the mysterious, threatening Necromancer that some of the characters allude to but never encounter, which is why I focus here on TLOR and The Silmarillion.4 Actually, Sauron never interacts, either, with any character in TLOR but there his actions and his always alert gaze condition the whole plot. ‘The truth is’, Battis maintains, that ‘Sauron himself is unknowable, for he offers no voice, no text, no image, no body—just the gaze itself. He is the ultimate, ungraspable form of power’ (919). My contention is that this is a fuzzy reading that needs to be urgently corrected: the power which Sauron wields even in this disembodied state is not ‘ungraspable’ but that of the quintessential patriarchal villain I am analysing here. The Silmarillion not only corrects the partial view of Sauron as he appears in TLOR but also offers a detailed description of how the individual’s lust for power leads to villainy with the story of Melkor’s fall. Given the mythological scope of Tolkien’s imagination, the scale that patriarchy assumes in his fiction is colossal, only comparable to its presence in real-life theocentric religion. The main point Tolkien makes is that since Melkor and Sauron are immortal their villainy

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  63 cannot be fully eradicated: it recurs several times in Melkor’s case, it reappears after his defeat with Sauron, and it is supposed to remain latent even after this second villain is vanquished. Villainy is recurrent, Tolkien warns, because villains like Melkor have a great power of s­ eduction over those who, like his loyal lieutenant Sauron, share the same patriarchal sense of entitlement to power. There are no doubts about Tolkien’s conservatism: his ‘texts do reveal values that are Eurocentric, white, middle-class, patriarchal—those of the majority of his generation in England, in fact’ (Moseley 63). As a devout Roman Catholic ‘of entirely traditional views’ (Carpenter Inklings 167–168) uncommon even among others of his faith, Tolkien was a particularly conservative, singular type of Englishman. TLOR, he declared, ‘is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision’ (Letters 172). This is not incompatible with my assessment (and Moseley’s) of his fiction as fundamentally patriarchal, for the mythology which Tolkien constructed aims at the restoration of ‘a patriarchal hierarchy as the highest spiritual, social and political ideal’ (Matthews 78), once the totalitarian regimes founded by Melkor and Sauron collapse. The manly Aragorn—a Man among the males of Tolkien’s other species—assumes the crown of G ­ ondor not only because he is the legitimate heir but because ‘his ascension is a matter of affirming form and structure rather than of rewarding a hero’ (78). The values behind this structure are as Catholic as they are patriarchal since, after all, Catholicism is a rigidly patriarchal religion still in the 21st century. Before addressing the feminist readings of Tolkien, I wish to endorse John  Garth’s insightful reading in Tolkien and the Great War5 of the legendarium as a complex text heavily influenced by the author’s participation in WWI. When the war started, Tolkien, then an undergraduate at Oxford University, was already composing parts of his budding mythology, as I have noted. He deferred enlisting until 1915, once he obtained his degree, because as an orphan and a penniless scholar he feared any interruption in his academic career; this would, besides, have put an end to the long struggle against his legal tutor to marry the young woman he loved, Edith. The couple finally married in June 1916 right before Tolkien travelled to France to take place in the Battle of the Somme. The very different destinies of J.R.R. Tolkien and Adolf Hitler are proof that the trauma of World War I found very different expressions. As it turns out, both were contemporaries (Hitler was born in 1889, Tolkien in 1892) fighting on opposite sides of the trenches in this battle, though, logically, that was a gigantic event into which many different men converged. When he started writing ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ in hospital, after ­returning home in October 1916 ill with trench fever, Tolkien had reached ‘a major imaginative turning point’ (Garth 214). This was marked by the

64  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy emergence of Melko (as Melkor was first called) from the experience of the Somme as ‘an abstraction of destructiveness and greed’ and a forewarning of ‘the totalitarianism that lay just around the corner’ (Garth 223). Melko was not connected with the Kaiser, just as Sauron is not an allegory for Hitler: rather, both villains embody ‘the tyranny of the machine over the individual, an international evil going back far earlier than 1914 but exercised with merciless abandon on the Western Front’ (Garth 300). It is also important to note that although Tolkien’s legendarium took on a manifest epic colouring at odds with the Modernist avantgarde of this period, he, though by no means a pacifist, never fell for the mystique of war, as any perceptive reader of his works (or of his letters to his son Christopher during WWII) can see. Each in their way, the warrior Aragorn and the heroic Hobbits Frodo and Samwise strive for peace, and so do the rest of the Fellowship; they engage in battle not because they enjoy warfare but because they must defeat an ultra-violent enemy. Their position mirrors, thus, that of WWI and WWII British soldiers. Either because Tolkien’s ‘four headed composite hero’ (Gandalf, ­A ragorn, Frodo, and, especially Sam) suggests that male heroism lies in ‘grace that is simple and humble in its redemptive suffering’ (Hyles 12), or because Tolkien’s Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary shapes his always respected female characters, feminist criticism has been remarkably lenient with his legendarium. This is surprising considering that the Fellowship of TLOR no doubt takes its inspiration from the author’s heavily homosocial circle: the Tea-Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS) of his boarding-school boyhood and the Inklings of Tolkien’s later Oxonian life (a club formed mainly with fellow writers C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams) were essential in his emotional and intellectual life. Nick Otty’s strenuous protest against Tolkien’s ‘openly paternalistic’ politics (172) and manifest misogyny is not generally echoed in feminist ­ aladriel, and criticism. This tends to celebrate instead the Elves Lúthien, G Arwen, and the incidental human woman warrior Éowyn as examples of empowerment. According to Enright’s feminist Christian reading, these female characters personify Tolkien’s ‘critique of traditional, masculine and worldly power, offering an alternative that can be summed up as the choice of love over pride, reflective of the Christ-like inversion of power rooted in Scripture, and ultimately more powerful than any domination by use of force’ (171–172). Particularly praised is Tolkien’s inclusion of powerful females among the Valar, the Children of Eru—the God figure in the legendarium, also called Ilúvatar—in The Silmarillion. Their appreciation is upheld by both conservative and progressive feminist critics. Melanie Rawls, writing in 1984 with the secondary aim of attacking the new strong female heroes then appearing in cinema (such as Ellen Ripley in Alien or Sarah Connor in The Terminator), defends Tolkien for his wise combination of the Feminine and the Masculine principles (her capitalized

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  65 initials). His females are not ‘mannish’ (13), whereas his males are neither ‘effeminate’ (13), nor chauvinistic. A central topic of The Silmarillion is how in Arda (or Earth) and in Heaven, ‘the Feminine and the Masculine are present; when they are in equilibrium and in harmony, there is Good, but Evil is the result of an insufficiency or a disharmony of the attributes of one or other of the genders’ (5). Defending less essentialist, traditional views, Whittingham writes nonetheless that in the process of devising his cosmogony, Tolkien’s ‘feminine immortals increase in prominence and authority until they take their place as equals of the masculine rulers’ (8). This may be true but there is a certain optimistic blindness in the refusal to see that, despite the presence of a handful of esteemed female characters, Tolkien’s legendarium is plainly androcentric: it concerns male heroes and villains and focuses on a plot about how uncontrollable, recurrent patriarchal power is transmitted. Often combined with the celebration of feminine power, some critics offer a vision of masculinity as an ailing construction in Tolkien’s world. Major Tolkien scholar Jane Chance writes in a chapter titled ‘The Failure of Masculinity’ that in his ‘male-dominated world’ masculinity is at risk as ‘a code (…) usually expressed through knighthood and chivalry, in romance, and (for Tolkien) in heroic epic’ (216). In Chance’s diagnosis, Tolkien presents masculinity (not patriarchy) in his ‘antiepic’ as an ‘obstacle’. The exaggerated masculinity of ‘the powerful characters who seem to dominate but fail’ indicates that Tolkien’s ‘less masculine heroes’ can conquer this obstacle ‘because of their very lack or deficiency of masculinity’ (‘Failure’ 216, my italics). The crises that erupt when first Melkor and later Sauron start exhibiting absolute power are not, however, a matter of how masculine each male character is (what, indeed, is the right measure?) but of the specific amount of power each one accrues. Masculinity is not really failing in Tolkien’s universe: the male characters presented as benevolent patriarchs, from the Valar sub-god Manwë to the humble Hobbit Frodo, fight to contain the threat posed by the overambitious villains. Like many other authors of epic tales, Tolkien narrates a story of intra-patriarchal infighting in which the villain is defeated by an apparently weaker hero, though I grant that Frodo is a singularly reluctant hero and, as such, a valuable creation. That Frodo cannot ultimately settle down, once he returns home back from his terrible odyssey, because of what we call today post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suggests, however, that he is an atypical rather than an alternative male, a singular individual instead of a role model (see Martín). Characteristically, men scholars commenting on Tolkien’s legendarium tend to ignore gender issues, focusing instead on how good and evil connect with power. Essentially, they debate whether Tolkien must be read as a Manichean believer in the separate existence of good and evil, a Boethian thinker convinced that evil springs from the absence of

66  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy good, or as an Augustinian defender of personal choice and free will (see as examples Shippey’s Author, Fry, and Houghton & Kees). The central occurrence in the legendarium of the tyrant-monster also present in most world mythologies as a ‘hoarder of the general benefit’ and as ‘the monster avid for the greedy rights of “my and mine”’ (Campbell 15) is taken for granted in this quite obsessive discussion of evil. So is Morgoth’s and Sauron’s ‘appetite for totalitarian rule’ and their characterization as part of ‘a line of powerful machine-makers’ who ‘subvert the natural order’ (Campbell ‘Nature’ 440). The evil qualities of the enigmatic Ring which Frodo must destroy absorb, instead, much scholarly energy even though a main contributor to the debate, Tom Shippey, offers a most relevant secular, alternative reading. According to him, Sauron’s Ring is, above all, “addictive” (Road 106, original double quotation marks), a fact which, Shippey adds, ‘solves all the doubts’ about how Tolkien deals with power (106). Tolkien persistently denied that his Ring had anything to do with either the Nibelungenlied or with Wagner’s operatic version but, even so, current criticism (Arvidsson, McGregor) stresses the covert connection, also citing other mythical sources. Day, for instance, mentions Odin’s golden ring Draupnir as a predecessor. The diverse attempts to fix a genesis for the Ring originate in the impression that ‘There has always been something mystified and frustrating about the emptiness of the Ring of Power (what power? Power over what?)’ (Chism 71). Even something faintly ludicrous. Ursula le Guin cuts the Gordian knot of the debate on evil arguing that Tolkien, ‘like all great artists’, is ‘too quick’ to be enmeshed by the ‘nets’ of ideology (174). But when she wonders ‘What kind of answer, after all, is to drop a magic ring into an imaginary volcano?’ (174) as a solution to the mighty question of evil, she unwittingly mocks Tolkien’s epic. I feel tempted to add fuel to the fire (of the volcano…) by pointing out that the Ring is a metallic circle enclosing a hole, and, as such, an object heavily loaded with sexual connotations. No wonder then that Frodo is symbolically castrated for falling under the spell of the addictive jewel when Gollum bites off his finger in his frantic efforts to possess the Ring. Gollum’s pleasure is short-lived, though, as he slips off the rim of Mount Doom’s crater to be destroyed, together with the Ring, in the fierce, raging womb of the volcano. Leaving metaphysical (and sexual) readings aside, Shippey simply contends, in The Road of Middle-earth, that the Ring is a literal representation of the idea that power corrupts. The popular saying that ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ originates, Shippey points out, in a letter which English Catholic historian and politician John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton addressed in 1887 to the Anglican Bishop Mandell Creighton. Whether Tolkien knew this letter is, Shippey notes, immaterial. What is relevant (and fascinating) is that its Victorian author made in it what was then a quite unconventional claim,

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  67 namely, that those in authority are accountable for crimes committed by their subordinates. Whereas Bishop Creighton was willing to exonerate the Pope of all criminal responsibility for the actions of the Inquisition since the Middle Ages, Dalberg-Acton strongly objected because ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority’ (n.p. online, my italics). Dalberg-Acton is adamant about ‘the general wickedness of men in authority’ (n.p. o ­ nline), among whom, by the way, he names Queens Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I, thus implicitly granting that women in patriarchal positions of power are somehow degendered to become honorary men. Following Dalberg-Acton’s bold argument, the god-like Eru (or Ilúvatar) should be ultimately accountable in Tolkien’s legendarium for the harm done by Melkor and Sauron. There have always been doubts about why, despite his own claims that it is fundamentally Catholic, Tolkien’s mythology lacks a Christian background and has such an aloof God. Tolkien rejected the possibility of recycling the Arthurian universe ­because ‘it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion’ (Letters 144), a rather odd stance for a believer. His biographer ­Humphrey Carpenter justifies the author’s choices on the grounds that Tolkien ‘cast his mythology in this form because he wanted it to be remote and strange, and yet at the same time not to be a lie’ (Biography 99, original italics), that is to say, he wanted it to be meaningful. My own view is that, although Tolkien was not secretly of the Devil’s party, he was furtively questioning absolute patriarchal power, including that of God in Catholicism. Instead, he defended a far more restrained, secular model of patriarchal masculinity—the one represented by his heroic quartet. This alternative is still androcentric, hierarchical, heteronormative, and moderately (rather than extremely) misogynistic but has a fraternal, rather than paternal, foundation which facilitates the establishment of alliances to hinder the triumph of recurrent villainy. This might be Tolkien’s main lesson: absolute power may not corrupt God/ Eru but it makes him an indifferent patriarch whose authority becomes superfluous, and, thus, potentially questionable and even replaceable.

Melkor’s Fall into Morgoth: Villainy as Frustrated Creativity The Lord of the Rings is, essentially, the story of Frodo’s quest to destroy Sauron’s Ring of Power. The Silmarillion is, in contrast, a collection of many different stories. While Sauron’s fall closes the Third Age,  the  texts of The Silmarillion—supposedly translated from the Elvish by the hero of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins—narrate the cosmogony of the First Age, or Elder Days, in the chronicle titled the ‘Ainulindalë’

68  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy (‘The Music of the Ainur’); the conflicts unleashed by Melkor’s lust for power during the Second Age in the ‘Valaquenta’ (‘Account of the ­Valar’)—­a text that includes the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’ (‘The History of the Silmarils’) which lends its title to the whole book; and the first steps in Sauron’s long villainous career in the ‘Akallabêth’ (‘The Downfallen’) and the tale ‘Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age’. Without mentioning Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Tolkien sentences that ‘There cannot be any “story” without a fall’ because ‘all stories are ultimately about the fall’ (Letters 147). His legendarium, then, begins with Melkor’s fall, which strongly recalls Lucifer’s humiliation despite significant differences from Christian myth. Tolkien’s divine patriarchal power structure is headed by the male god Eru, the One, later called Ilúvatar by the Elves. Tolkien uses ‘he’ for the divine spirit Eru, which is why he needs to be read as male; the same applies to Melkor. Alone, Eru generates with his thought the Ainur, or Holy Ones, fifteen angelic spirits invited to join their creator to produce the music from which eventually creation emerges. The Ainur are powerful because they have the power to create, not to dominate. However, Melkor, the most gifted of them, soon decides to take a bigger share of the power and glory apportioned to him by making his own tunes. Eru tries to appease him, to no avail, and eventually ends the ‘discord’ and the ‘sea of turbulent sound’ (‘Ainulindalë’ 4) by mixing his melodies with Melkor’s, reminding the rebel that ‘no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite’ (5). Melkor is overcome by ‘shame, of which came secret anger’ (6, my italics), the emotional sources of his villainy. This soon manifests itself in Melkor’s spiteful disruption of the creation tasks carried out by the other Ainur and in his ambition to dominate Eru’s other Children—the Firstborn (the Elves) and the Followers (Men)—because he desires ‘to be called Lord, and to be a master over other wills’ (7). Technically, there is no fall given that Melkor is not expelled from Heaven; rather, he chooses a corner of the newly made Arda (the result of the music) to start waging a relentless war against his siblings. Flieger rightly notes that Melkor’s fall (in the sense of chosen isolation) happens ‘in the very act of creation’, which means that unlike God’s creation in the Biblical Genesis, Eru’s universe is ‘imperfect from the beginning’ (154–155). Melkor is usually read as an arrogant character who, driven by his sense of entitlement to power, disobeys Eru. His subsequent villainous behaviour is mostly interpreted as an overreaction to an imaginary wrong. No evil action is committed against him: on the contrary, his revolt is ‘itself the origin of evil (…) leading him not so much to vengeance as to fear, hatred, and envy’ (Rosebury 6). There is, nevertheless, an important flaw in this thesis and in Tolkien’s cosmogony: Melkor is given immense might but he is severely reprimanded for using it in creative

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  69 ways, which seems unfair. The author does acknowledge that ‘frightful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others’ (Letters xiv). Eru’s behaviour, however, is that of an absolutely controlling patriarchal father who feels entitled to limiting his son’s abilities: he commits the main offence from which villainy emerges, for instead of encouraging Melkor or even collaborating with him, Eru constrains him. Understandably, Melkor feels humiliated and, hence, angry. Similarly, Tolkien explains that Sauron, corrupted by ‘the Prime sub-creative Rebel’ Melkor, could have repented after his master’s defeat; however, he ‘could not face the humiliation of recantation’ and, thus, he eventually ‘became the main representative of Evil of later ages’ (Letters 190, my italics). Neither Eru nor his favourite Manwë know how to transform the pride from which villainy emerges into something positive, even though this is absolutely necessary to control power-hungry tyrants or prevent their rise. Manwë’s failure, in particular, seems to signal an implicit warning from Tolkien about the inability of justice to dominate evil from a position of benevolent, paternalistic power. Manwë acts as leader for the Ainur, renamed the Valar when they take residence in Arda’s Valinor, a sort of Eden. To facilitate their communication with Eru’s Elves, the Valar assume male and female bodies, according to personal temper. All are immensely mighty, yet Manwë, Aulë, and Ulmo are the main geological creators, whereas the females, led by Varda, are in charge of animal and vegetal life.6 Envious of his beautiful siblings, Melkor takes a material body, which is ‘dark and terrible’ (‘Ainulindalë’ 11) because of his malice but also capable of causing an impression of ‘power and majesty greater than any other of the Valar’ (11). Tolkien is quite vague about what exactly he means but the many illustrators of his works have always depicted Melkor as a hypermasculine colossus, usually clad in black armour and with his face covered by a helmet, the very image of the warrior as patriarchal villain. Melkor, whose name originally means ‘He who arises in Might’, becomes Morgoth, ‘the Dark Enemy of the World’ 7 when, as the ‘Valaquenta’ narrates, he loses the first battle against the Valar for the dominion of Arda. There is something almost comical about the ­inability of the all-powerful Valar to restrain Morgoth’s constant pestering. This is motivated not only by his wish to dominate Arda but also by his wish to sexually possess the goddess Varda, who, Tolkien tells us, rejected him before Eru allowed the Valar to play music; oddly, both were then disembodied spirits. Once in Arda, Morgoth grows jealous of Manwë because he is Varda’s partner and the Valars’ leader, though he is even more jealous of Aulë, the divine engineer, because Eru allows him to be as creative as he wishes. When the impatient Aulë creates the Dwarves rather than wait for Eru to produce more of his Children as announced, he is not punished, which, of course, vexes Morgoth.

70  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy ‘From splendour’, the ‘Valaquenta’ narrates, Morgoth ‘fell through arrogance to contempt for all things save himself, a spirit wasteful and pitiless’ that became ‘a liar without shame’ (23, my italics). Since he could not possess the Light, Morgoth ‘descended through fire and wrath into a great burning, down into Darkness’ (23), which became his signature element in the attacks against Arda. Morgoth uses his demagogic skills to persuade many Maiar (the non-human helpers of the Valar) to become his minions, even at the cost of being transformed into monstrous creatures. Some Maiar are attracted by the memory of Morgoth’s past splendour as Melkor, among them Aulë’s servant Mairon, renamed Sauron; Morgoth entices others ‘to his service with lies and treacherous gifts’ (23). Sauron, the ‘Valaquenta’ points out, collaborates actively with Morgoth in all his misdeeds, being ‘only less evil than his master in that for long he served another and not himself’ (23). Only when Morgoth is vanquished, does Sauron give free reign to his own villainy, mainly built by imitation. Julia Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror that the abject—literally that which is rejected—appears when the ego previously ‘merged with its master, a superego’ is suddenly unwanted (or feels unwanted) and so constantly defies its master ‘from its place of banishment’ (2). This pattern corresponds to Morgoth’s persistent but indirect confrontation with Eru though his Children. The ‘Quenta Silmarillion’ narrates the second war between the Valar and Morgoth, this time for dominion over the Quendi (as the Elves are known then). At this point in the legendarium the humiliating laughter of the Valar Tulkas the Strong, a sort of generalissimo of the gods, has pushed the cowardly, sulking Morgoth to abandon Arda. Left, typically, to his own devices by his irresolute siblings, Morgoth builds his underground fortress of Utumno and the stronghold of Angband, commanded by Sauron. He launches next a brutal attack to destroy the lights of Illuin and Ormal (Arda’s first Sun and Moon), partially ruining, besides, Arda’s landscape. Yavanna and Nienna make two magical trees to replace the broken lights and temporarily forestall Morgoth’s reign of Darkness. Manwë, nonetheless, still cannot bring himself to restraining the villain. Morgoth continues, thus, his perverse manipulation of nature, transforming the Elves he has kidnapped into Orcs ‘by slow arts of cruelty’ (‘Quenta Silmarillion’ 47). Finally, Morgoth’s many other acts of meanness lead the Valar to lay siege to Utumno and capture the villain, though Sauron manages to escape his master’s fate. The Valar system of justice proves to be totally inefficient. Manwë initially resists Morgoth’s hypocritical begging for pardon, ordering him to be imprisoned in the stronghold of Mandos, ‘whence none can escape’ (49). The sentence, however, is limited to three Ages (not long in the existence of immortal creatures), after which the term can be renewed ­supposing Morgoth does not repent. The Valar never attempt to re-educate

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  71 Morgoth and, full of hatred, he easily deceives his siblings by feigning remorse. Absurdly, Manwë frees him, believing that Morgoth’s wickedness is ‘cured’ (66). Kane claims that Manwë appears to be ‘a naïve simpleton’ (83) because the text published in The Silmarillion was not the version Tolkien considered final. The fact is, nonetheless, that Manwë’s imprudent handling of Morgoth is justified by the author on the grounds that the thoroughly virtuous Valar leader cannot understand the nature of evil. Ulmo and Tulkas are far less lenient, but patriarchal rules prevent them from questioning Manwë, for, Tolkien writes ‘those who will defend authority against rebellion must not themselves rebel’ (66). This loophole in patriarchal justice causes the ensuing tragedy which brings disaster to the Noldor Elves. Initially, the Elves offer a potent alternative to Morgoth’s obsession with power and to his use of the magic to build the Machine, the military technology which he engineers. The Elves’ ‘object is Art not Power, subcreation not domination and tyrannous reforming of Creation’ (Letters xiii, original uppercase and italics); this is the reason why they fall as soon as they discover possessiveness. The Noldor, Aulë’s Elven protégées, are highly skilled jewellers. When, aided by his ally the giant spider Ungoliant, the spiteful Morgoth destroys the two holy trees of light at Valinor, the Noldor chief Fëanor manages to salvage some of the dying light to fashion from it the three jewels known as the Silmarils. This action causes a major crisis: the goddess Varda asks Fëanor to hand the jewels over, but her request excites a sudden hunger for possessiveness. Soon, the Noldor and Morgoth start fighting each other and the Valar for the ill-fated Silmarils. Morgoth’s initial strategy is to establish an alliance with the Noldor against the Valar, soon broken by Mandos. His subsequent ill-treatment of Fëanor turns the humiliated Noldor leader into yet another angry male on the verge of villainy, though he aims his hatred at Morgoth rather than Mandos. It is Fëanor who renames Melkor as Morgoth, the Black Foe of the World, as part of the curse which he casts when the villain breaks into his home, kills his father King Finwë, and steals two of the Silmarils. Eventually, Morgoth proclaims himself King of the World after bullying Ungoliant into handing over the third Silmaril, which she had taken, and setting the three jewels in his crown. Morgoth finds, however, no enjoyment in his reign. The cursed Silmarils scorch his hands ‘and black they remained ever after; nor was he ever free from the pain of the burning, and the anger of the pain’ (‘Quenta Silmarillion’ 86, my italics). The crown soon turns into an onerous encumbrance and Morgoth starts regarding his fortress at Angband as a self-imposed prison. Disgusted, the villain abuses his minions who learn to fear rather than respect him. Despite Fëanor’s pleas, the Valar choose again inaction, claiming that the raging Morgoth poses no imminent danger. Morgoth regains,

72  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy of course, enough strength to continue his war against the Noldor, attempting to take their land of Beleriand. Fëanor dies in battle, his son Maedhros is awfully tortured and, although Morgoth’s temporary defeat secures the two-hundred-year Long Peace, the villain uses once more this truce to rearm his forces and improve his strategy. Still, the Valar do nothing and the Elves are forced to defend themselves as best they can. Fëanor’s son Fingolfin challenges Morgoth to single combat but, although he manages to repeatedly wound his gigantic enemy he is crushed to death. As a sort of symbolic punishment, Morgoth never heals from the pain of his wounds (which is added to that caused by the Silmarils): his foot is permanently damaged by one of Fingolfin’s wounds and the eagle Thorondor badly scratches his face when Morgoth tries to throw his enemy’s body to the wolves. The collaboration between Morgoth and Sauron is sealed in this p ­ eriod of the Second Age. No mere lieutenant, Sauron becomes ‘a sorcerer of dreadful power’ (‘Quenta Silmarillion’ 180). He helps his master to conquer Gondor’s capital, Minas Tirith, and plays a major role in the love story between the mortal Man Beren and the immortal Elf Lúthien. King Thingol unkindly requests Beren to steal a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown to win the hand of his daughter Lúthien, presuming the feat impossible. Trying to get the jewel, Beren is imprisoned by Sauron at Angband and Lúthien comes to the rescue. Hearing her sing beautifully, Sauron captures Lúthien as a gift for his master but, underestimating her cleverness, Morgoth’s lieutenant is ultimately forced to flee. ‘The lack of generosity’ typical of Tolkien’s villains, Poveda writes, ‘is also a lack of intelligence. In general, they are easily tricked’ (171). Lúthien indeed takes advantage of Morgoth’s foolhardiness. Understanding that he wants to rape and enslave her, Lúthien lulls Morgoth to sleep with her charmed singing and, so, when the crown rolls off the tyrant’s head, Beren takes one Silmaril. The romance reaches a happy end after many misadventures, but, once again, the chance is missed to restrain Morgoth when he is most vulnerable under Lúthien’s spell. There is no specific reason why the Valar finally face Morgoth in the Great Battle, also named the War of Wrath, after hundreds of years during which the long war continues and the rift between the Elves and Men grows. Morgoth is again defeated and trapped, though treated this time more harshly when he tries to sue for pardon: he is restrained with the sturdy chain Angainor, ‘his iron crown they beat into a collar for his neck, and his head was bowed upon his knees’ (‘Quenta Silmarillion’ 302).8 Finally perceiving that Morgoth is controllable, the Valar throw him ‘into the Timeless Void’ (306) to be constantly watched. The villain, however, leaves a poisonous legacy that Sauron will later reap: his lies, ‘a seed that does not die and cannot be destroyed; and ever and anon it sprouts anew, and will bear dark fruit even unto the latest days’ (306).

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  73 With Melkor/Morgoth, then, Tolkien presents villainy as an immortal force that can be only temporarily contained. The patriarchal discourse is transparent not only in the presence of the divine father Eru/Ilúvatar who creates and empowers the Ainur/Valar but also in Melkor’s manifest sense of entitlement to power. Melkor’s villainy, however, is not inborn, as Tolkien acknowledged, but the result of his shaming by the unfair Eru. Furthermore, Eru’s paternal appropriation of Melkor’s melodies suggests that he secretly feels jealousy for the strange art of his son. Melkor’s progressive transformation into Morgoth—his discovery of anger, envy, possessiveness—and his enduring, large-scale villainy can thus be attributed to Eru’s unwise ill-treatment. This is a classic situation in patriarchal masculinity: instead of encouraging the son, the father chastises him for his (alleged) weaknesses, which only results in anger and the will to accrue as much power as possible to take revenge. Melkor cannot fight Eru directly but he carries out a long war against his Valar siblings and against his father’s Children, the Elves and the Men. Having learned a bitter lesson from Eru, Melkor/Morgoth is an ideal patriarchal father/master for Sauron, who does all he can to keep his legacy alive in gratitude. Regrettably, Morgoth teaches Sauron the dark strategies of villainy for destruction and domination and not, as he could have done if the original Ainur Melkor had never fallen, how to use his power for the creation of artistic beauty.

Sauron: The Rise of the Lieutenant Sauron’s reverence for Morgoth is useful to explain how villainy is transmitted in a patriarchal context, not only from father to son but also from leader to lieutenant. Persuasion is most effective, as noted, in the case of males with a dormant but strong sense of entitlement to power, which is Mairon/Sauron’s case.9 Sauron’s rise to power once Morgoth is imprisoned at the end of the First Age is narrated in the ‘Akallabêth’ and ‘Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age’, two overlapping texts better commented on jointly. Already in the earliest period of Arda, Melkor ‘seduced [Sauron] to his allegiance’ (‘OtR’ 341, my italics). What made Sauron especially useful is his ability to shape-shift at will and to look ‘noble and beautiful, so as to deceive all but the most wary’ (341, my italics). Incidentally, the motif of the handsome male that loses his beauty to villainy recalls Lucifer’s transformation into Satan but also connects with Voldemort’s in the Harry Potter series. When Morgoth is deposed, Sauron uses his original ‘fair hue’ as a convenient mask while he declares his repudiation of ‘all his evil deeds’ (‘OtR’ 341), partly in earnest, partly in fear. As I have noted, Sauron ultimately escapes rather than face the humiliation of being judged. Once in Middle-earth, ‘he fell back into evil, for the bonds that Morgoth had laid upon him were very strong’ (‘OtR’ 341),

74  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy but, characteristically, Manwë and the Valar do nothing to locate and restrain him, just hoping that Sauron will not act as Morgoth did. His teacher’s apt pupil, Sauron bides his time, full of hatred against Elves and Men. The powerful Men of Númenor, in particular, attract his envy, which ultimately leads to their downfall and to Sauron’s first major defeat. Before this happens, Sauron assumes the identity of Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, to visit Eregion, a land of the Noldor; there, he is told that the smiths of Ost-in-Edhil can make Rings of Power. Sauron learns their craft and, unwittingly, he seals his own destiny by forging in the aptly named Mount Doom the One Ring, an artefact onto which he passes a great deal of his might. The Ring is also an instrument of magical Orwellian surveillance for Sauron, which allows him to ‘perceive all the things that were done by means of the lesser rings, and he could see and govern the very thoughts of those that wore them’ (‘OtR’ 344). The Elves resist Sauron’s dominion and ‘in anger and fear’ take off their own Rings, keeping three over which he has no control (Narya the Ring of Fire, Nenya the Ring of Water, and Vilya the Ring of Air). Others, in contrast, are more pliant: the seven Rings given to the Dwarves and the nine given to the Men allow Sauron ‘to bring under his sway all those that desired secret power beyond the measure of their kind’ (‘OtR’ 345, my italics). Sauron sets up in this way what he believes to be an unbeatable structure of power, especially appealing to those with a previous sense of entitlement. With the Rings in place, Sauron completes his fortress of Barad-dûr and emerges as Morgoth’s true successor in the Black Years, instituting among the Men in Middle-earth, Tolkien notes, an ‘evil theocracy (for Sauron is also the god of his slaves)’ (Letters xiv). He inherits from his master his formidable forces (Balrogs, Orcs, dragons, wolves) to which he adds the Nazgûl, or Ringwraiths, the Men fallen under the spell of their Rings. The ‘Akallabêth’ narrates Sauron’s conflict with Númeror. The Númenórean King Ar-Pharazôn, another classic patriarch, grows extremely angry when he learns of Sauron’s machinations against his kingdom because ‘his heart was filled with the desire of power ­unbounded and the sole dominion of his will’ (323, my italics). He decides to proclaim himself King of Men, forcing Sauron to pay him homage as his servant. To his surprise, Sauron submits immediately but, once in the capital city of Armenelos, he starts using his beauty and skilled rhetoric to subjugate its inhabitants, including the King. Sauron ‘is ­dangerous mainly because he can manipulate his appearance, speech, and intentions in ways that conceal his true purpose, thus carrying on the tradition of seduction that Morgoth initiated with him’ (Alberto 70). It is unclear whether Sauron is working toward Morgoth, as the Nazis worked toward Hitler, or just using Morgoth’s name. Whatever the case may be, as King’s counsellor he convinces Ar-Pharazôn that, if liberated,

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  75 Morgoth could free Númenor from the power of the Valar; Sauron even presents Eru as their invention. He builds next a temple where Melkor (for he never calls his master Morgoth) is offered human sacrifices. Under his mentorship, Ar-Pharazôn ‘grew to the mightiest tyrant that had yet been in the world since the reign of Morgoth, though in truth Sauron ruled all from behind the throne’ (‘Akallabêth’ 328). This new situation has literal catastrophic consequences. Manwë appeals to Eru and the god responds by reshaping flat Arda as a globe, which causes the separation of Valinor and the Elven land of Eressëa from Middle-earth. Númenor sinks, like Atlantis, in a great chasm and most Númenóreans perish. Sauron is deprived of his handsome looks and reduced to the black shadow that takes refuge in Mordor. Once in Barad-dûr, he grows a new body, ‘an image of malice and hatred made visible; and the Eye of Sauron the Terrible few could endure’ (‘Akallabêth’ 336). Unlike what Peter Jackson’s film series and many critics suggest, Sauron is not reduced to being just an eye. Tolkien simply means that Sauron’s gaze (his eye) is terrifying but he is supposed to have, like Morgoth, a g­ igantic, humanoid male body. Sauron is confident that his indestructible Ring protects him from being vanquished and disembodied again. He underestimates, however, his enemies. The Númenórean Isildur, a descendant of the exiled Amandil (Sauron’s main opponent in that conflict), faces Sauron at the end of a long seven-year siege of Barad-dûr and manages to cut off the finger with the Ring. After this symbolical castration, which recalls Frodo’s, Sauron loses his body again, hiding as a shadow for long years (a plot turn that J.K. Rowling borrowed for Voldemort in Harry Potter). The Third Age which begins then is characterized by how the Ring taints its successive owners with an uncontrollable lust for power. The Ring slips off Isildur’s finger when he dies in an Orc ambush and eventually the jewel is fished off the river where he drowns by two Stoor Hobbits. Sméagol, later known as Gollum, murders the finder, his friend Déagol, to become e­ nslaved by the Ring’s allure. As The Hobbit narrates, the Harfoot Hobbit Bilbo Baggins robs Gollum of the Ring, remaining relatively ­unscathed by its power. His resistance offers the wizard Gandalf the clue he has been seeking about how to control Sauron: the Ring must be carried back to Mount Doom to be destroyed. This is the mission which Frodo (a Hobbit of mixed Harfoot and Fallowhide descent) accepts carrying out. Both ‘Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age’ and The Lord of the Rings narrate not only Sauron’s final defeat but also the consequences of Gollum’s dependence on the addictive Ring and the fall of the wizard Saruman into villainy. Gandalf and Saruman are the names which Men give to Mithrandir and Curunír; both are non-human Maiar like Sauron who, like him in the earlier stage, wear ordinary male human bodies. The Istari, as they are also called, are guardians sent by the Valar ‘to contest the power of Sauron, if he should arise again’ (‘OtR’ 359).

76  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy Saruman gives himself the task of studying how the Rings of Power work, but he soon becomes ‘a traitor in heart’ (‘OtR’ 362). Whereas ­Sauron would probably play again the role of trusted lieutenant if Morgoth ever escaped, Saruman aspires to usurping Sauron’s place out of envy fuelled by a deeper sense of entitlement to power. He is a villain disloyal to both sides whose double betrayal forces Gandalf to conceal the Ring once he locates it in Bilbo Baggins’s possession. At approximately the same time Bilbo steals the Ring from Gollum in The Hobbit, ignoring what it is but curious about why its possessor is so obsessed with it, Sauron is defeated by the White Council—formed by the Elves Elrond, Galadriel and Círdan, and the Istari—in an attack led by Saruman. Sauron is next evicted from his stronghold of Dol Guldur, where he operated as the Necromancer, and moves to Mordor. There, he starts yet another cycle of re-empowerment during which he eventually signs a volatile alliance with the treacherous Saruman. Sauron is just ‘the shadow of the past’ (as Chapter 2 in The Fellowship of the Ring is called), his name part of half-forgotten legends, at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, even though rumours of atrocities carried out by his Orcs and Trolls have reached the peaceful Shire where the Hobbits live. Gandalf convinces a reluctant Bilbo to relinquish the Ring which he has owned for about twenty years and move to Elrond’s paradisal home at Rivendell, to enjoy there the last stage in his long life. Frodo, Bilbo’s cousin and adoptive son, receives the Ring, among other possessions, only to discover that it is a poisonous legacy. Gandalf leaves the jewel in Frodo’s responsible hands for seventeen long years, which shows how poor Sauron’s magical surveillance is, but eventually persuades the ­Hobbit to undertake his extremely dangerous quest because the Enemy, he claims, is growing strong. Since Frodo is fundamentally a gentle creature and has never tried to put the Ring on, he has only noticed one of its odd side effects: he has not aged. So enticing is the Ring’s promise of empowerment, however, that Gandalf refuses to touch it, afraid that he would fall into the temptation to enhance his already great might, as happened to Saruman. Overwhelmed, Frodo replies to Gandalf’s awful disclosure about the events at hand and the impending quest ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time’ (TLOR/TFR 64). Once Frodo accepts his daunting mission, Sauron fades to the background and Lord of the Rings focuses primarily on Frodo’s coming to terms with his fate while other characters—mainly Gollum and Saruman but also Boromir, Wormtongue, and Denethor—face the consequences of their fall to the dark side. It is not unprecedented for a villain to lend his name, or title, to a work in which he is just a secondary character: this also happens in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which shares some key points with Tolkien’s long novel. The Fellowship formed to help Frodo recalls the Company formed to protect Mina and hunt down the vampire in a thrilling chase all over Europe. Gwyneth Hood reads

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  77 Sauron and Dracula as ‘tyrant-monsters of similar motives and powers’ (‘Dracula’ 11), joking that ‘Compared to Sauron, however, Dracula is a warm and likable character’ (14). In another article Hood connects Sauron with the mythical Basilisk and the Gorgon, on the grounds that in the three cases being seen by the monster is fatal (‘Gorgon’ 59). She connects, likewise, Dracula’s and Sauron’s eyes because both use them to subdue their victims (‘Dracula’ 14). Certainly, for them ‘watching becomes, in a very real sense, a means of possession through dominance and control’ (Harl 63). Dracula, however, has a physical, intimate relationship with his victims through his bite whereas for Sauron contact only happens, if at all, in battle. Sauron never touches his enemies, but his Ring does, propagating his lust for power as if the jewel were in fact a sort of psychic vampire. Elrond explains that the Ring cannot be used against its owner, as the warrior Boromir proposes, because ‘The very desire of it corrupts the heart’ (TLOR/TFR 285). The Ring, supposedly a projection of Sauron’s personal power, appears to be power itself, which makes the presence of the villain in the story almost superfluous, except as the source of the Ring’s dark energy. Frodo is dismayed to realize that none of the wise Elves, Men, and Dwarves present in the Council meeting that seals his own fate can withstand temptation. Elrond shows immense relief when Frodo takes on the quest. His assurance that ‘I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will’ (TLOR/TFR 288) is a shocking declaration, for with it Tolkien suggests that nobody is immune to the appeal of villainy. In fact, not even Frodo, despite Elrond’s trust. The Council does not actually discuss whether Frodo can resist the Ring’s temptation. There is a touch of speciesism in the general consensus that a Hobbit can accomplish the mission because, presumably, they are not sophisticated enough to appreciate absolute power. Frodo, nevertheless, has a clear understanding of what is at stake. He has learned from the intriguing Tom Bombadil, a personification of the pagan forces of nature, that some individuals are not tempted at all by the jewel. Playing with Frodo’s anxiety, Bombadil borrows the Ring, puts it on his little finger and disappears. Visible again, he laughs and returns the jewel ‘with a smile’ (LOTR/TFR 148), surprising Frodo with his nonchalance. Frodo does not mention the episode during Elrond’s Council, but he concludes that there is among the present another candidate to take the Ring: the Elven Lady Galadriel. Finding her ‘wise and fearless and fair’ (TLOR/TFR 384) Frodo offers her the jewel. She acknowledges her interest using a double negative: ‘I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer’ (TLOR/TFR 385). Yet, like Bombadil, she laughs and even jests: ‘In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night!’ (TLOR/TFR 385). When Galadriel puts

78  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy the Ring on her finger she is immediately transfigured, looking ‘beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful’; laughing again, she returns the jewel, happy to have passed ‘the test’. Frodo’s servant and quest companion Sam insists that she would use the Ring well but Galadriel replies that ‘That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!’ (TLOR/TFR 385). Since Galadriel is female (though not a woman, for she is an Elf), it might be argued that she disproves the anti-patriarchal argumentation here offered. Quite the opposite: her presence reinforces it. Patriarchal power has been so far in the hands mainly of the men with a strong sense of entitlement. Galadriel is, as a female, an exception in her aristocratic Elven circle, yet at the same time she is as powerful as any patriarchal first-rank male Elf. If she is not tempted into villainy, this is not because she is female but because she is satisfied with her power (or so Tolkien claims). The Ring does not awaken her sense of entitlement because she is a well-balanced individual. Exactly the same point can be made about male Bombadil. This does not mean that Galadriel is an alternative feminist figure: she’s as patriarchal as Elrond and the rest of characters in Tolkien’s legendarium, for all agree that the place of the individual in Middle-earth is conditioned by how much power they wield. Tolkien never claims that the system of power should be abolished, he just expresses a wish that the Elves’ constructive brand of power could dominate Sauron’s destructive variety. Galadriel herself declares that the Elves are no alternative. Once Frodo destroys the Ring, the Elves will have ‘to go West’, that is to say, abandon Middle-earth, return to the divine realm of the Valar, and be forgotten. A new age, dominated by Men, will then begin. Tolkien splits the following two parts of TLOR into parallel stories once the tale of The Fellowship of the Ring is told. In The Two Towers and The Return of the King Frodo and the faithful Sam proceed to fulfil their mission in the unsafe company of Gollum, showing once more an imprudent reluctance to restrain or kill the villain (perhaps because he was once the Hobbit Sméagol). Meanwhile, Tolkien leads the rest of his cast of characters to fight Saruman’s and Sauron’s armies, as he completes the narrative arc of Aragorn’s crowning as King of Gondor. The constant military action in this subplot and the horrors of Frodo and Sam’s journey through Mordor in the other absorb Tolkien’s energy for many pages. The discussion of how to solve the problem of recurrent of villainy is, therefore, postponed until the final segment of The Return of the King. Saruman’s subplot contrasts with Gandalf’s empowering transformation into an even mightier wizard, clad in white instead of grey, after his fight with a gigantic Balrog—one of the former Maiar turned into monstrous creatures by Morgoth’s corruption. Saruman assembles his own army of non-human and human monsters, using also his ability

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  79 to shape-shift to spread mayhem. He is supported in his villainy by his underling Wormtongue,10 the trusted counsellor of King Théoden of Rohan and a traitor so despicable that even Saruman loathes him. The Battle of the Hornburg (or of Helm’s Deep) significantly diminishes Saruman’s forces and he is forced to takes refuge in Orthanc, the tower of his fortress at Isengard where he once imprisoned Gandalf. Saruman almost manages to overpower his enemies using one of his most dangerous weapons, his seductive voice, but Gandalf literally disempowers him by breaking his wizard’s staff when Saruman rejects the chance to sever his ties with Sauron. Peter Jackson was so dissatisfied with Tolkien’s decision to let ­Saruman escape that he rewrote the scene at the Orthanc tower for the film adaptation, having Wormtongue dispatch his master. Tolkien narrates instead how, once the Ring is destroyed, Saruman becomes a wandering beggar, still in Wormtongue’s company. Gandalf finds both on the road, but the fallen villain rejects his help and even laughs at the Elves, knowing that their power is also waning. Shortly thereafter, the four Hobbit friends return home to find their peaceful, pastoral Shire devastated by what might be described as an instant Industrial Revolution. ‘This is worse than Mordor!’, Sam complains (TLOR/TRK 1055). Using a false identity as Sharkey, Saruman justifies the wreckage as an act of revenge; characteristically, Frodo banishes him because he pities Saruman as he pitied Gollum, though his fellow Shire citizens demand that the villain be executed. ‘It is useless to meet revenge with revenge’, Frodo argues, ‘it will heal nothing’ (TLOR/TRK 1056). Saruman escapes punishment but makes the mistake of revealing Wormtongue’s many crimes in public. His humiliated servant cuts Saruman’s throat before being himself lynched by the aggrieved Hobbits. Horrified, Frodo sees Saruman’s body dissolve, leaving no trace. Those who hesitate to read Sméagol as a villain, and even defend him as a hero, should recall that although as Gollum he is a victim of uncontrollable forces, as Sméagol he does not hesitate to strangle his friend Déagol motivated by his sense of entitlement to the Ring they find together. His love affair with the jewel leads to appalling physical degradation, for, Gandalf tells Frodo, ‘the thing was eating up his mind, of course, and the torment had become almost unbearable’ (TLOR/ TFR 68). Excessive power in the hands of common persons, then, causes madness and Frodo certainly risks his sanity during his mission. Yet, just as the Valar hesitate for too long to control Morgoth, Frodo and Sam Gamgee fail likewise to contain Gollum, despite the obvious threat that he poses for their lives, particularly in the last leg of their journey to Mount Doom. Frodo’s judgement may be clouded by the burden of carrying the Ring, the intuition that Sauron is constantly watching him, and his fear of death. Sam’s awareness of Gollum’s murderous intent, however, is not impaired by these factors. Even so, despite the sincere,

80  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy deep love he feels for Frodo, Sam hesitates to kill Gollum out of pity for the physical ruin of the abject creature. Sam bears the Ring for a short time, while Frodo is a prisoner of the Orcs, and understands in this way the torment which Gollum endures. His empathy, nonetheless, puts at risk Frodo’s success in the scene when he prepares to cast the Ring into Mount Doom for, without Sam’s protection, he is completely vulnerable to Gollum’s rage. Actually, Frodo fails in his quest and it might even be argued that Tolkien’s universe has no heroes at all: only individuals struggling not to become villains. Mount Doom brings out the worst in Frodo and the secret guilt he feels about his behaviour there is the real reason why he can never heal. Frodo fails twice: with his anger at Sam for having taken the Ring and in the final confrontation with Gollum. Sam has no option but put the Ring around his neck right before Frodo is captured by a band of Orcs. He hesitates to return the Ring to Frodo, left for dead by the quarrelling Orcs, not because he is falling under its spell but because he wishes to protect his master from it. A furious Frodo, however, coldly rejects Sam’s offer to share the burden and calls him ‘thief’, causing Sam immense pain. His tears shame Frodo into asking for Sam’s forgiveness but he still rejects his renewed offer of help, seemingly out of a classist prejudice against regarding his loyal servant as his equal. Frodo’s real equal turns out to be Gollum. When both meet at the rim of the crater with Sam as a witness, Frodo announces ‘I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!’ (TLOR/TRK 981). Barad-dûr is shaken to its foundation as Sauron becomes finally aware of ‘the magnitude of his own folly’ (TLOR/TRK 981) in losing sight of the lost Ring; still, he sends the Nazgûl rather than face Frodo directly. Sam sees next Gollum grapple with an invisible Frodo, who is using the Ring’s protection. The fight ends when Gollum snaps with his sharp fangs Frodo’s ­fi nger, as I have noted. Overwhelmed by glee, Gollum loses his footing and falls into the volcano, together with his Precious, as he calls the Ring. The scene is focalized through Sam and we have no access to ­Frodo’s feelings. He, however, soon concedes his defeat and acknowledges that Gollum has actually completed his mission: ‘But for him, Sam, I could not have destroyed the Ring. The Quest would have been in vain, even at the bitter end. So let us forgive him!’ (TLOR/TRK 983). Frodo does not seem overly distressed by his lapse at Mount Doom although his incomplete healing shows, as I have suggested, that the episode generates PTSD based on a gnawing, secret sense of guilt. Sauron’s limitations as an Orwellian Big Brother are apparent in this last episode of the quest. Cleverly, Gandalf decides to distract his attention from Frodo and Sam by presenting battle, though the forces he and Aragorn assemble are pitifully small. If Gollum had not accidentally destroyed the Ring, their army would have been defeated. Gandalf

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  81 realizes that the Ring is gone and Sauron’s regime at an end only when he sees that black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell. (TLOR/TRK 985, my italics) The Third Age ends with Sauron’s new disembodiment and the destruction of Barad-dûr. His immortality and that of Morgoth indicate, nevertheless, that ‘the triumph of light’ is ‘at best, temporary’ (Fry 90). The appendices which Tolkien added to TLOR disclose ‘that the Fourth Age, the age of Men, proved to be hardly a better time than the Third Age of wizards and Elves’ (Wood 85). The epic tale does not reach, thus, what Tolkien himself called eucatastrophe, the ‘Consolation of the Happy Ending’ which is ‘the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function’ (‘On Fairy-Stories’ 153). He offers instead bittersweet relief: the chain of transmission of patriarchal villainy is broken with Sauron’s defeat but Tolkien warns that it might eventually rebuild itself. This will happen whenever a Man reads Morgoth or Sauron as admirable role models to imitate and thus fulfil his own sense of entitlement to power.

Notes 1 See Thompson and Baker & Mathijs on Jackson’s film series. 2 See Christopher Tolkien’s twelve-volume series The History of Middleearth (1983–1996). This is not a chronicle of Tolkien’s imagined land but an amazingly complete survey of how he composed his magna opus, which considers the many textual variations. The three-volume box set (2002) runs to 5,392 pages. 3 Tolkien was fascinated by the Finnish epic Kalevala (1835) composed by Elias Lönrot using Finland’s folklore as an inspiration and translated into English in 1888 by John Martin Crawford. William Morris translated diverse legends from Iceland in collaboration with Icelandic scholar Eiríkr Magnússon, among them the Völsung saga. Morris subsequently wrote pioneering high fantasy fiction in English, such as the romance A Tale of the House of the Wolfings (1889). See Massey on Morris’s influence on Tolkien. 4 I cannot consider here either, for lack of room, Melkor’s first appearance as Melko in ‘The Music of the Ainur’, part of The Book of Lost Tales (vol. 1), which Tolkien wrote between 1917 and possibly 1920 but abandoned. Christopher Tolkien edited and published the two volumes of Lost Tales as the first books in The History of Middle-earth (1983, 1984). 5 Garth follows Shippey’s contention that Tolkien is a member of the group of ‘traumatized authors’ who published fantasy in response to the experience of war. This group also includes George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, and William

82  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy Golding in the UK, and American authors Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller (Author xxix–xxx). 6 The fourteen Valar are the males Manwë, Ulmo, Aulë, Oromë, Mandos, Lórien, and Tulkas and the females Varda, Yavanna, Nienna, Estë, Vairë, Vána, and Nessa. Melkor is the Valar number fifteen. 7 This name, which I use from this point onwards, is given to him by the Noldor, the second clan of the Elves. Croft notes that with ‘this act of naming they actually assert their power to resist Melkor by rejecting his original name. The other Valar, however, continue to use his original name, as does Sauron in his efforts to continue his master’s work’ (153). Morgoth and Sauron are also often called ‘the Enemy’. 8 The Valar Eönwë is entrusted with the custody of the Silmarils. Fëanor’s sons, led by Maedhros, take them later from the Valar but find that their painful touch cannot be endured: ‘And thus it came to pass that the Silmarils found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters’ (‘Quenta Silmarillion’ 305). 9 Mairon means ‘admirable/excellent one’ (Gilson 163). Mairon was renamed Sauron when he became Morgoth’s ally but ‘continued to call himself Mairon the Admirable, or Tar-mairon “King Excellent”, until after the downfall of Númenor”’ (Gilson 183, original italics). Tolkien claimed that ‘there is no linguistic connexion, and therefore no connexion in significance’ between Sauron—which he connects with the adjective ‘saura’, meaning ‘detestable’— and the Greek ‘saura’ or ‘lizard’ (Letters 380). He cannot, however, prevent readers from automatically making this unwanted association. 10 J.K. Rowling most likely had Wormtongue in mind when she created the equally treacherous Wormtail for her Harry Potter series.

Works Cited Alberto, Maria. ‘“It Had Been His Virtue, and Therefore also the Cause of His Fall”: Seduction as a Mythopoeic Accounting for Evil in Tolkien’s Work’. Mythlore 35.2 (2017): 63–79. Arvidsson, Stefan. ‘Greed and the Nature of Evil: Tolkien versus Wagner’. Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 22.2 (Summer 2010): n.p. (restricted online access). Barker, Martin & Ernest Mathijs (eds.). Watching the Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s World Audiences. New York, etc.: Peter Lang, 2008. Battis, Jes. ‘Gazing Upon Sauron: Hobbits, Elves, and the Queering of the Postcolonial Optic’. Modern Fiction Studies 50.4 (Winter 2004): 908–926. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). London: Fontana, 1993. Campbell, Liam. ‘Nature’. A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, Stuart D. Lee (ed.). Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2004. 431–445. Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: Grafton, 1992. ———. The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their Friends. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981. Chance, Jane. ‘The Failure of Masculinity: The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (1920), Sir Gawain (1925), and The Lord of the Rings, Books 3–6 ­(1943– 1948)’. Tolkien, Self and Other: ‘This Queer Creature’. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 215–239.

Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy  83 Chism, Christine. ‘Middle-earth, the Middle Ages, and the Aryan Nation: Myth and History in World War II’. Tolkien the Medievalist, Jane Chance (ed.). London: Routledge, 2003. 63–91. Crocker, Holly A. ‘Masculinity’. Reading the Lord of the Rings: New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic, Robert Eaglestone (ed.). London and New York: ­Continuum, 2005. 111–123. Croft, Janet Brennan. ‘Naming the Evil One: Onomastic Strategies in Tolkien and Rowling’. Mythlore 28.1–2 [107–108] (Fall-Winter 2009): 149–163. Dalberg-Acton, John Emerich Edward. ‘Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887’. Lectures on Modern History, J. N. Figgis & R. V. Laurence (eds.). London: Macmillan, 1906. Available online from http://oll.libertyfund. org/titles/acton-acton-creighton-correspondence#lf1524_label_010 Day, David & Alan Lee (ill.). Tolkien’s Ring. London: Pavilion, 1999. Enright, Nancy. ‘Tolkien’s Females and the Defining of Power’. J.R.R. ­Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Harold Bloom (ed.). New York: Bloom’s Literary ­Criticism, 2008. 171–186. Flieger, Verlyn. ‘The Music and the Task: Fate and Free will in Middle-earth’. Tolkien Studies 6 (2009): 151–181. Fry, Carrol. ‘“Two Musics about the Throne of Ilúvatar”: Gnostic and Manichaean Dualism in The Silmarillion’. Tolkien Studies 12 (2015): 77–93. Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. ­London: HarperCollins, 2003. Gilson, Christopher (ed.). ‘Words, Phrases and Passages in Various Tongues in The Lord of the Rings’ (monographic issue). Parma Eldalamberon 17 (2007): 1–220. Harl, Allison. ‘The Monstrosity of the Gaze: Critical Problems with a Film ­Adaptation of The Lord of the Rings’. Mythlore 25.3–4 (Spring-Summer 2007): 61–69. Hood, Gwyneth W. ‘Sauron and Dracula’. Mythlore 14.2 [52] (Winter 1987): 11–17, 56. ———. ‘Sauron as Gorgon and Basilisk’. Seven 8 (1987): 59–71. Houghton, John W. & Neal K. Keesee. ‘Tolkien, King Alfred, and Boethius: Platonist Views of Evil in The Lord of The Rings’. Tolkien Studies 2.1 (2005): 131–159. Hyles, Vernon. ‘On the Nature of Evil: The Cosmic Myths of Lewis, Tolkien & Williams’. Mythlore 13.4 (Summer 1987): 9–13, 17. Kane, Douglas Charles. Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP, 2009. Le Guin, Ursula K. ‘The Staring Eye’. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Susan Wood (ed.). New York: Putnam, 1979. 171–174. Martín Alegre, Sara. ‘Facing Xenocidal Guilt: Atypical Masculinity in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Saga’. Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World, Àngels Carabí & Josep Maria Armengol (eds.). New York: Palgrave ­MacMillan, 2014. 145–157. Massey, Kelvin Lee. The Roots of Middle-earth: William Morris’s Influence Upon J.R.R. Tolkien. PhD dissertation. University of Tennessee, 2007. http:// trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/238

84  Morgoth and Sauron: Recurring Villainy Mathews, Richard. Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination. New York: Twayne, 1997. McGregor, Jamie. ‘Two Rings to Rule them All: A Comparative Study of Tolkien and Wagner’. Mythlore 29.3–4 [113/114] (2011): 133–153. Moseley, Charles. J.R.R. Tolkien. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997. Otty, Nick. ‘The Structuralist’s Guide to Middle-earth’. J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land, Robert Giddings (ed.). London: Vision and Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1983. 154–178. Poveda, Jaume Albero. ‘Villains and the Representations of Evil in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fiction of Middle-earth’. Brno Studies in English 31.11 (2005): 155–174. Rawls, Melanie. ‘The Feminine Principle in Tolkien’. Mythlore 10.4 (1984): 5–13. Rosebury, Brian. ‘Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien’. Tolkien Studies 5 (2008): 1–20. Shippey, Tom A. ‘The Lord of the Rings (2): Concepts of Evil’. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins, 2000. 112–160. ———. The Road to Middle Earth. London: Allen & Unwin, 1982. Thompson, Kristin. The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007. Tolkien, Christopher (ed.). The History of Middle-earth. London: Allen & ­Unwin, 1983–1996. Tolkien, J.R.R. ‘On Fairy-Stories’. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983. 109–161. ———. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), Christopher Tolkien (assist.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. ———. The Silmarillion (1977). Christopher Tolkien (ed.). London: HarperCollins, 1999. ———. The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955). London: Unwin, 1989 (1983). ———. The Hobbit (1937). London: Unwin 1985. Whittingham, Elizabeth A. The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2007. Wood, Ralph. ‘Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is not Manichean’. Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature, and Theology, Trevor Hart & Ivan Khovacs (eds.). Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2007. 85–102.

4 Steerpike Gormenghast’s Angry Young Man

Mervyn Peake: Tapping into the Zeitgeist The legendarium built by J.R.R. Tolkien sinks its roots into the author’s ambition to incorporate England to the list of northern European ­nations with a mythology of their own. In contrast, the fantasy world created by Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) in his three ‘Titus Novels’—Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959)—appears to be a deeply personal affair and a singularity in the history of English Literature, with ‘no really close relative’ (Burgess 13). This impression of uniqueness is, besides, promoted by the habitual presentation of the ­author as a remarkable person at different levels: ‘It was as if the huge creative fire burning in him touched everything he attempted, so that even in the slightest and lightest of his work there is something of that inner intensity’ (Watney 13). Not every critic is convinced of Peake’s merits. In New Maps of Hell (1958), Kingsley Amis famously (and unfairly) called Peake ‘a bad fantasy writer of maverick status’ (152). The demeaning slur did some damage to Peake’s reputation for a time but after the publication in 1968–1969 of the ‘Titus Novels’ as Penguin Modern Classics Peake found not only the large readership which he had always sought but also a place in the canon. Despite this, staunch admirer Colin Manlove has referred to the ‘Titus Novels’ as ‘the products of a real, even a great literary ability strangled in its own toils’ (‘Mervyn Peake’ 257). Peake’s biography1 offers few clues about why he wrote the ‘Titus Novels’ when he did—indeed, about why he wrote them at all. Peake was born to English missionary parents in Kuling (Lushan), in central China, the country where he lived for the first twelve years of his life until 1923, when the family returned to England. It is, therefore, tempting to read Titus’s fabled realm of Gormenghast as a Western version of a fundamentally Chinese tale of palatial ritual and intrigue. Peake, though, never returned to China as an adult and he did not refer to this nation anywhere in his work (at least not overtly). Gifted with a remarkable artistic talent, Peake trained for a few months at the Croydon School of Art (1929) before enrolling in the Royal Academy Schools (1929–1933), both in London. His writing, and the ‘Titus Novels’ are no exception,

86  Steerpike, Angry Young Man was always closely connected with his art not only because he published books with his own illustrations—like his first volume, the children’s story Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939)—but also because he would sketch his characters as part of the process of writing. Peake, a valued artist who often exhibited his work, always toiled simultaneously in a variety of projects which included painting (mostly portraits), original drawings, illustrating other writers’ volumes, and writing. As a writer he practised a variety of genres: children’s fiction and poetry, adult poetry (lyrical, narrative, and humorous), drama (for stage and radio), and fiction. This included his three ‘Titus Novels’, the novella Boy in Darkness (1956, also part of Titus’s saga)2 and the unrelated comic fantasy novel Mr. Pye (1953). Peake seemingly cared, above all, for his rather unfashionable free verse farce The Wit to Woo (1957). Its failure after just a few weeks on stage at London’s Arts Theatre plunged the author into a profound mental and physical crisis, from which he never recovered. He spent the last ten years of his life (1958–1968) in a slow physical and mental decline caused by the combination of Parkinson’s disease with the early onset of Lewy body dementia. His condition was aggravated by the treatment received, which included electroshocks and an ill-advised brain operation. The third ‘Titus Novel’, Titus Alone, was published in 1959, when Peake was no longer in full control of his mental faculties, which might explain not only the problems which many critics have noticed in its execution but also its faulty first edition.3 This novel closed a most productive period of twenty years in Peake’s career, which began with the onset of WWII and lasted until his disease manifested its worst symptoms. As soon as the war started in September 1939, Peake volunteered his services as a war artist but, aged only twenty-eight and fully abled, the Army preferred to recruit him as a soldier. Eventually, in 1940, he was called up by the Royal Artillery. He was by then already married—in 1937 to artist and writer Maeve Gilmore (1917–1983)—and the father of a son, Sebastian, just born. Between 1940 and 1942 Peake submitted new requests for his artistic skills to be employed in the war effort but all were dismissed for not quite clear reasons. The Army sent him during this time to a variety of posts, always in England, at which Peake routinely failed, both because he resented military discipline and because he was plain incompetent as a soldier. He never saw active service. Since he was burdened with relatively mild tasks, Peake used his free time to start writing the ‘Titus Novels’, beginning Titus Groan in 1940 while he trained as an artilleryman. This undertaking was interrupted by the nervous crisis which Peake suffered in 1942—provoked by his exasperation at not being employed as an artist—and by the commissions he finally received in 1943 to produce a series of war paintings for the British Government. Peake was ultimately dismissed on health grounds in that same year, when he finished Titus Groan, but he was still to

Steerpike, Angry Young Man  87 undergo the most harrowing war-related experience yet. Always worried about the family’s precarious finances, and with a second son, Fabian, already born (in 1942), his wife Maeve persuaded Peake to accept a commission by the magazine Leader consisting of illustrating a series of articles on the extermination camp of Bergen-Belsen. Peake visited it in June 1945, an experience which resulted in deep trauma, possibly stronger than combat was for many soldiers. Titus Groan was published only a year later, and although Gormenghast (written between 1946 and 1948) might be supposed to contain signs of this trauma, most critics agree that Titus Alone, presumably written between 1956 and 1959 after Boy in Darkness, is the work where the impact of Peake’s visit to the camp is most perceptible. There is then a certain mystery about why Peake decided to begin the ‘Titus Novels’ in his circumstances not only because producing shorter texts (like the poems he always wrote) seemed more adequate than writing long novels while being subjected to military duty but also because the theme of the novels seems quite disconnected from the situation of the author. The man whom Tanya J. Gardiner-Scott has called a ‘dark romantic’ (in the title of her monograph) has been described as someone ‘always out of place, or at least an outsider, in the contemporary world’ (Redpath 60). Although Peake’s ‘unworldliness’ (Manlove ‘Meryn Peake’ 240) may be an exaggeration, part of the construction of Peake’s bohemian artistic persona, it makes sense to see Gormenghast as ‘an area into which he could imaginatively escape’ (Redpath 60). Still, this does not explain why he would specifically focus on Steerpike’s picaresque misadventure to conquer power and next on Titus’s chafing at the bonds that keep him tied to Gormenghast. Intriguingly, the lighter mood of Steerpike’s villainous tale in the first volume emerged during the period which led to Peake’s breakdown, whereas the rebellious teen Titus was born once Peake was free of his imposed military service. It is always risky to place literary works of fiction in the context of the author’s biography but the lack of clues as to how these two characters connect with Peake is certainly tantalizing. In his 1968 introduction to Titus Groan Anthony Burgess underlined the presence in Peake’s work of ‘a certain built-in self-mockery, most evidently proclaimed in the grotesque names and titles’ (12) of his characters. The frequent use of the adjective ‘grotesque’ in reference to Peake’s artistic and literary work does not explain, however, which precise variant of this challenging aesthetic interested him. What seems evident is that his view of the grotesque is highly personal and at points disconcerting, even distressing—it is the kind which hints that there might be something out of tune in the mind nurturing it. This is the impression suggested by the bizarre project which Peake presented to the British Ministry of Information in 1940. He persuaded the authorities to issue a leaflet supposed to be the catalogue for ‘an exhibition by Hitler’

88  Steerpike, Angry Young Man for which Peake drew ‘paintings showing mutilated, raped or starving victims of war atrocities, as he imagined Hitler might have drawn them’ (Kennedy n.p. online). The Government considered printing 100,000 copies to be scattered all over South America but finally backed out of this eccentric plan. The paintings, retained as Government property in the National Archives at Kew, were finally seen in a 2011 exhibition. Peake’s eldest son Sebastian, one of his main champions, praised then his father for creating images ‘which would later become so familiar from films and photographs, out of the force of his own invention, years before any of these events had happened’ (in Kennedy n.p. online). His praise, however, raises an uncomfortable issue: why would a man with no personal experience of Hitlerian horror create those images in the comfort of his safe home? Even Peake’s main biographer G. Peter Winnington finds this episode disquieting (Vast Alchemies 145–146). There is, likewise, an idiosyncratic awkwardness in the three ‘Titus Novels’, as if the author was enjoying an obscure private joke to which we are not privy. Elber-Aviram places Peake in a line that runs from Dickens to the contemporary English urban fantasy of Peake’s admirers such as Michael Moorcock—possibly the fellow writer who has done most to canonize him—and China Miéville. He highlights, like ­Manlove, the influence of Bleak House on the ‘Titus Novels’ ‘for the obvious reason that it was one of his favourite books and the only Dickens novel that he was commissioned to illustrate (circa 1945)’ (7), though this edition was never published. For this scholar one of Peake’s main merits is ‘his refusal to lock Titus’ either ‘in a Tolkienesque hermetic world’ (22) or in a pseudo-Dickensian London. This refusal is especially evident in the third novel, Titus Alone, which takes place away from the labyrinthine space of crumbling Gormenghast castle in a futuristic urban landscape (for which it is usually considered to be science fiction rather than fantasy). However, although it is always unfair to judge the author by the character, Peake’s high investment on Titus is hard to explain. Whereas family and friends describe Peake as a genial, fun-loving, generous man of intense feelings, the hero he favoured is a dour, selfish, angry teen who comes across as far less sympathetic than the bold, self-motivated villain Steerpike. Both Titus and his foe are, in addition, snobbish and misogynistic but whereas this can be expected from the villain, these features are far less welcome in a hero opposing him. Titus, in short, elicits discomfort and, in a way, so do the three ‘Titus Novels’. Adam Roberts has argued that both Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the ‘Titus Novels’ are ‘accounts of the catastrophe in traditional Englishness occasioned by the war’ and, above all, by ‘the decay of an idea of England: the collapse of a particular fantasy of the realm’ (Roberts n.p. online, original italics). He does take into account that Tolkien belongs to a previous generation and that he was involved in

Steerpike, Angry Young Man  89 WWI, not WWII, but in fact Peake’s limited war experience leaves no ground for this comparison. In addition, the visit to Bergen-Belsen that so profoundly shocked Peake took place when Titus Groan was already written, as I have noted, which means that Steerpike and Titus must be tied to the author’s own personal crises in closer ways than Sauron and Frodo are tied to Tolkien’s. We might speculate, for instance, that Peake was motivated not so much by the historical background as by the experience of being a father: the birth of baby Titus and baby Sebastian overlap in Peake’s biography, and it might well be that the boy Titus fuses in his person the father’s observations and fantasies about his son (or sons, including Fabian) with Peake’s own youthful nonconformism. Winnington claims that ‘the tension between obeying the inner voice and composing with the outer world was tremendous, and it was a tension he was never to resolve’ (Vast Alchemies 95); most likely, it was also a major source of Peake’s roguish sense of humour. My suggestion is that while Peake’s penchant for the grotesque has a joyful side from which the mischievous Steerpike emerges, the tension which Winnington describes is the main source for Titus. This tension is also the reason why the insolent, troublesome Steerpike of Titus Groan becomes the smug, progressively insane villain of Gormenghast as soon as Titus assumes the role of rebellious protagonist. At the same time, with both characters Peake taps into a new mood gradually consolidating between the 1940s and the 1950s in the West. Adolescence, a concept introduced by American psychiatrist Stanley Hall in his eponymous 1904 volume, supposed that this period of life extends between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. The new category of the teenager, introduced by American marketing agencies in 1944, referred more narrowly to persons between thirteen and nineteen. The US teenager, empowered by the war economy, was established as ‘a discrete age group with its own rituals, rights, and demands’ (Savage xv) once WWII was won. European teenagers took a few more years to emerge but ‘Indeed, the definition of youth as a consumer offered a golden opportunity to a devastated Europe’ (xv).4 Gormenghast might seem to be completely disconnected from this social background but the fact is that not only did Peake place at the centre of the ‘Titus Novels’ the new figure of the teenager but he also presented anger as a central feature of the young man’s characterization. He did so intuitively, far from any debates on what soon would be known as the rebel without a cause or the angry young man, 5 but simultaneously, in the crucial period between 1940 and 1959. If the overlapping has not been considered before this is simply because of the habitual segregation of the study of fantasy from the study of mimetic fiction, a practice that should be revised. Not only Amis, Osborne, and company tapped into the zeitgeist: so did Peake, and even before them.

90  Steerpike, Angry Young Man

Steerpike and Titus: Angry Young Men Avant la Lettre The three ‘Titus Novels’ narrate yet another classic patriarchal fable, focused on the rise and fall of the villain Steerpike. As he tries to climb to the top of the hierarchy controlling Gormenghast castle, the men of the Groan dynasty face the problem of how to fulfil their demanding duties. Sepulchrave, the Earl of Groan and Titus’s father, craves, as his name indicates, the sepulchre, overwhelmed by the impositions of the ancient patriarchal Ritual. He eventually allows himself to be devoured by the ravenous owls in his home (though these birds are not known to prey on humans), rather than reform Gormenghast’s regime. Steerpike’s secret harassing of the Earl and his family plays an important part in this death and its aftermath, but Titus’s selfish choices are also problematic. The heir—the son favoured above his elder sister Fuchsia—feels an innate revulsion against the Ritual and the obligation to occupy his father’s place. Interested only in his freedom, Titus claims it after killing the upstart Steerpike and placing the burden for continuing the absurd regime on the shoulders of his aloof mother, Countess Gertrude. Neither Peake nor Titus consider, however, the possibility of having Fuchsia inherit and modernize Gormenghast. Instead, her accidental death, which Titus misreads as suicide, provides the boy with an excuse to murder his rival. This violent act is Titus’s only concession to patriarchal duty: he protects Gormenghast but rejects all the other responsibilities that accompany his privileged position as man and heir. Despite the Hamletian overtones in Titus’s tragedy, he and Steerpike closely connect with other 1950s male fictional characters, created by the group of English writers collectively known as the Angry Young Men. In his witty and informative volume on this movement Humphrey Carpenter presents it as a creation of the media, popularized through reviews. Beginning with the publication of Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim in 1954, interest in the Angry Young Men reached a peak with John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956, Royal Court), and declined afterwards. By 1958, when Kenneth Allsop published his insider memoirs, the label was beginning to sound obsolete.6 Allsop was extremely critical, defining the anger everyone was discussing, which was always coded male, as ‘a sort of neurological masturbation’ (20) and ‘a textbook psychotic situation: the emotional deadlock in a person caused by a general conviction that certain major man-made problems that man is facing are beyond the capacity of man to solve’ (21). Allsop’s comment suggests that Titus rather than Steerpike is the quintessential angry young man, though they can be read as variations on the same figure. Steerpike, Morgan writes, ‘hopes for eventual dictatorship replacing the Groan dynasty with an even more rigid and frustrating regime’ (77), whereas Titus ‘represents a second and perhaps more serious threat’ (77), which this critic does not specify. Arguably, this

Steerpike, Angry Young Man  91 is the same threat that the male protagonists of the realist (or mimetic) fiction, drama, and cinema of the Angry Young Men posed: a revolt against traditional patriarchal masculinity presented as a generational craving for freedom, which is actually an antisocial, selfish withdrawal from communal participation. Angry Steerpike aspires to being the fascist dictator of Gormenghast, climbing his way from the very bottom to the top. Angry Titus, occupying the room at the top as Earl, is an even worse alternative: he abandons his patriarchal duties out of hatred for their many impositions, choosing instead a solipsistic retreat into his feelings rather than secure the welfare of his community. The main reason why the ‘Titus Novels’ have not been read so far as novels about the angry masculinity of the British 1940s and 1950s is that they are fantasy. Most accounts of the English Literature of this decade, focused or not on the specific Angry Young Men movement, tend to ignore them. In Radical Fictions Nick Bentley proposes to expand ‘the traditional litany of 1950s novelists’ (15)—Evelyn Waugh, Grahame Greene,7 C.P. Snow, Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain—‘to alternative, marginalized or “radical” texts and writers such as Alan Sillitoe, Colin MacInnes, Sam Selvon and Muriel Spark’ (16), forgetting Peake.8 Alice Ferrebe also neglects to mention Peake in her Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes, focusing again exclusively on the realist novelists and playwrights. In another volume, devoted specifically to Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000: Keeping It Up, Ferrebe bypasses Peake once more, though she classes Anthony Burgess’s dystopian fantasy Clockwork Orange (1962) with ‘the sanctioned rebellion’ of the 1950s Angry Young Men (139).9 Ferrebe criticizes how for most key male characters in this movement, such as John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, ‘The only good, brave cause may lie in bemoaning the lack of such a cause, but male individual assertion in a society which privileges male individual assertion still remains an act of conformity rather than rebellion’ (140). These words also apply to Steerpike and Titus. In another study that also overlooks Peake, Crowley reads angry novels such as Phillip Larkin’s Jill (1946), Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam (1954), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), or John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), as works that ‘commonly explore themes of entrapment and escape, particularly in relation to the renegotiation of gendered (particularly masculine) identities, issues of employment, the sexual relationships of their protagonists and the continuation of the rigid class stratification of British society in the post-war period’ (56). Although some of these themes resonate in the ‘Titus Novels’ there is an obvious matter that does not: most Angry Young Men characters are working-class, whereas Titus is an aristocrat. Manlove—who, exceptionally, does read Titus as a ‘rebel without a cause’—claims that in

92  Steerpike, Angry Young Man Titus’s rebellion Peake presents ‘something of that challenge of the status quo that began after the war and the victory of a largely demotic army’ (‘Rebel’ 9), but, even so, this is a doubtful claim. Steerpike’s climb from the depths of Gormenghast’s kitchen, where he is employed, seems much closer to the spirit of that victory (besides, his anger literally presents the ‘Titus Novels’ as ‘kitchen sink’ drama). The brutal come-­ uppance which Steerpike receives from Titus suggests that Peake may have been in favour of anti-patriarchal rebellion but not really of social revolution. As Manlove notes, ‘Peake is sympathetic to hierarchical society’ (‘Rebel’ 11), which is why ‘What is seen as acceptable in Titus as a renunciation of rank, is made repellent in Steerpike as the lust for power. But still, Steerpike as rebel, in whatever cause, compromises Titus as rebel’ (‘Rebel’ 11). The reason why ‘Despite his evil actions’ Steerpike ‘remains appealing to the reader’ is that this upwardly mobile young man is ‘one of us’ with very ‘human qualities’ (Johnson 12), whereas the privileged rebel Titus is never really engaging because of his snobbish self-centredness. Steerpike occupies a significant position in the British mid-20th-­ century discourse on youthful villainous patriarchal masculinity, which runs from Grahame Greene’s pioneering Brighton Rock (1938) to Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), passing through William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954). These male English authors discuss a similar issue, namely, the earliest age at which villainy emerges. Golding offers the most depressing answer, for his Jack is twelve going onto thirteen when he imposes his tyranny against the democratic alternative which his foe Ralph defends in their all-male desert island. The story of Burgess’s vicious Alex begins when he is fifteen and ends three years later, not because the Orwellian experiments to control his criminal inclinations are effective but because, feeling old enough, he suddenly decides to adjust to society’s demands, marry, and become a father. For both Peake and Greene, seventeen is the crucial age: Steerpike is that age when he takes the first step in his upward climb and so is Pinkie Brown when he becomes a Brighton gang boss. There are, however, important differences among the three novelists. Greene ridicules Pinkie’s claim to power by presenting him as a rather bumbling, pathetic young man,10 and, though he does not go so far, Peake stresses the more bizarre aspects of Steerpike’s characterization. Golding’s Jack is, in contrast, a truly scary character. His determination to establish himself as absolute ruler is grounded on the enhancement of personal qualities usually ­presented as positive, such as his capacity for leadership. In comparison, the hedonistic Alex, who has no other aspiration but to enjoy himself, is a rather minor type of patriarchal villain. His narcissism and strong sense of entitlement to pleasure rather than power may harm the community, but he is presented as a structural nuisance rather than a deep threat to society.

Steerpike, Angry Young Man  93 The main analysis of Peake’s portrayal of masculinity is Alice Mills’s Stuckness in the Fiction of Mervyn Peake. Using a psychoanalytic approach combining diverse currents, Mills claims that Peake’s male protagonists become psychologically, and even physically, stuck and thus ‘consistently fail to resolve their problems’ (7). Her view connects thus with Allsop’s diagnosis of the Angry Young Man as neurotics. These problems are caused, Mills adds, by the Oedipal confrontation ‘with either the physical or symbolic mother’ (4), a role ostensibly played by all the main female characters which Peake created. These ‘mother figures are viewed with repugnance or dread’ which is why for the misogynistic male characters ‘falling into their embrace is equivalent to dying’ (7). Mills partly excepts Titus’s much older mistress Juno in Titus Alone from this misogynistic distaste but even this is questionable. Whereas stuckness is linked to the fear of women as mothers, its opposite, adherence, is ‘explicitly associated with patriarchy’, presented as a chain of transmission binding the successive Earls of Gormenghast through ritual ‘regulated by senior male office bearers’ (54). For Mills, Steerpike fails because his ‘model of adherence to Gormenghast proprieties’ (55) is read by others as an imposture and, so, he becomes stuck, loses his sanity, and is eventually killed by Titus. On his side, Titus cannot overcome his stuckness despite this murder and ‘the symbolic death of self-exile’ (56), and for this reason his journey eventually takes him back home (though only seen from afar). Gertrude, Mills notes, unsettles both young men: on the one hand, in the absence of her late husband, she leads Steerpike’s unmasking; on the other, once Steerpike dies, she becomes the embodiment of the system which Titus rejects. Mills even blames Titus’s lovers—the motherly Juno but, above all, the privileged, egocentric Cheetah—for his evident emotional regression in Titus Alone, though she carefully refrains from attributing any misogyny to Peake himself. My own reading is less scrupulous: Peake’s tale displays classic patriarchal misogyny in his portrait of women in the three ‘Titus Novels’. However, they are not, in my view, the cause of the men’s stuckness but their victims: neither Steerpike nor Titus can successfully negotiate the compulsory adherence to patriarchy because of their own angry, rebellious masculinity. Women are mainly collateral damage in this patriarchal conflict but not its source, though Gertrude certainly occupies a central position as the judge of each young man’s masculinity. Steerpike’s is unmasked by her as a monstrous man, whereas Titus escapes before his mother can find him wanting as the new patriarchal Earl. Other critics circumvent the question of Peake’s gender ideology by reading the ‘Titus Novels’ as a mythopoetic exercise on evil. Pierre François, justifies the proximity between Titus and ‘his shadow self Steerpike’ (‘Stasis’ 7), not on the grounds of their being fundamentally patriarchal angry young men but because ‘the solar hero and his demonic counterpart may be conventionally antinomic’ but are in

94  Steerpike, Angry Young Man Peake’s novels ‘as inseparable as a moving body and the shadow that it projects “outside”’ (‘Stasis’ 10, original italics). In this reading Steerpike is not a poor kitchen boy suddenly awakening to his male sense of entitlement to patriarchal power, but ‘the flesh-and-blood embodiment of a universal drive which is not so much an “idea” as a libidinic longing obsessively channeled into actions, strategies and impetuses’ (‘Stasis’ 17, original italics). François may be right to read Titus in relation to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, which is contemporary to Peake’s writing, casting Steerpike in the role of the adversary. Yet, his insistence that the villain lacks conventional motivation and is stimulated, rather, by ‘demonic possession by the power drive’ (‘Thanatos’ 17)—which leaves him with no free will or a conscience—is too abstract. Winnington proposes that the turn towards madness that Steerpike takes in the second novel is a direct product of Peake’s visit to Bergen-Belsen, which ‘made him question the nature of man and wonder if some people might have no ability to choose the good, or even awareness of having choice, and be therefore incapable of anything but evil’ (Voice 172). Steerpike’s trajectory, he concludes, is an instance of ‘such a journey to hell’ (174, original italics). This does not mean that the villain cannot make moral choices because he is somehow overcome by an impersonal power drive but the opposite: his personal lust for power leads him to act in ways that ease his access to power, and these are ways that can be hardly good. Steerpike’s choice of villainy, however, is not as straightforward as it is often assumed, for, like Hitler’s, his rise is mainly opportunistic, benefitting from the gaps in the structure of power in Gormenghast created by the rigid, antiquated style of its governance. His rise and fall constitute a classic cautionary tale about the dangers of excessive male empowerment and the possibility that ambitious, conniving villains may become tyrants. The problem is that in the process of understanding this danger and his own position as Gormenghast’s heir Titus becomes a contradictory angry hero. He does fulfil his heroic mission of eliminating the villain but the reward he claims is personal freedom from any further obligation. His teen rebellion is a romantic rejection of patriarchal constraints, but it constitutes a dereliction of civic duty potentially as harmful as Steerpike’s tyranny. Titus may be too young and there might be some justification for his right to demand a measure of freedom, but Gormenghast would certainly benefit from his leadership much more than from his anger.

Steerpike, the Social Climber: ‘Man of Purpose’ Steerpike (no first name) may have been inspired by Peake’s reading of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–1850). Winnington connects his name specifically with that of James Steerforth in this novel (Vast Alchemies 100). There is, however, a far closer association with another character in the same novel by Dickens, as Gardiner-Scott has

Steerpike, Angry Young Man  95 noticed (63).11 In Chapter XV, the reader is introduced to the obsequious, fawning fifteen-year-old Uriah Heep, another young villain. He shares with Steerpike not only their distinct hypocrisy but also a handful of physical features: the cadaverous face, the red-brown eyes, the high shoulders, the bony frame, and even the preference for wearing black. Heep tells David ‘modestly’ that ‘I am well aware that I am the umblest person going’ (229) but readers eventually learn that this humbleness is a cover for his deep sense of entitlement and his villainy. Little by little, and supported by his equally ‘umble’ mother, Heep worms his way into Mr. Wickfield’s office and home, hoping to marry his daughter Agnes and thus establish his own patriarchal rule. For this end, he does not hesitate to use blackmail, which also covers his own fraudulent professional malpractice. When in Chapter LII, he is finally exposed by his employee Mr. Micawber, David Copperfield reports his astonishment at seeing Uriah drop his mask: The suddenness with which he dropped it, when he perceived that it was useless to him; the malice, insolence, and hatred, he revealed; the leer with which he exulted, even at this moment, in the evil he had done—all this time being desperate too, and at his wits’ end for the means of getting the better of us—though perfectly consistent with the experience I had of him, at first took even me by surprise, who had known him so long, and disliked him so heartily. (730) The scene when Steerpike is unmasked by his antagonists—Dr. Prunesquallor, Mr. Flay, and Titus—produces a similar impression, though with a major difference. Whereas David Copperfield represents the Victorian world of order and respectability, Titus Groan is, as I have noted, in full rebellion against his earldom of Gormenghast. There is no order to return to once the villain Steerpike is eliminated, unless we assume that Countess Gertrude successfully establishes herself as the new patriarchal ruler, a tale Peake chose not to tell. The lives of the kitchen boy and the Earling are always closely connected. Titus’s birth is the reason why Flay, first servant of Titus’s father Lord Sepulchrave, visits the kitchen where Steerpike has been employed for just one month by the abusive Chef Swelter. Peake gives no background whatsoever to the boy. He materializes out of the blue—orphan, bastard, or both—improbably provided with ‘a talent for words and a ready mind’ (TG 132), though he can hardly have received an accomplished education. As author Joanne Harris observes, ‘you can never see Steerpike as a child, it never computes’ (in BBC video). Steerpike is, in his own judgement, ‘clever enough to know I am clever’ (TG 125). Equipped with this self-assurance, and his ‘mature hatred’ (TG 22) of his superiors, he sees a chance to convince Flay that he should employ him instead of his hated rival Chef Swelter. This plan backfires because Steerpike, having overheard that the newly born Titus is ugly attempts to blackmail

96  Steerpike, Angry Young Man Flay without realizing that, in this way, Gormenghast’s loyal servant will become one of his worst enemies. What China Miéville has called Steerpike’s ‘insurrectionary force’ (x) is, then, born of improvisation initially mismanaged. Steerpike is not moved by ‘an unfaltering (though increasingly brutal) personal commitment to meritocracy, individualism, and social mobility’ (Eckstein 93) but by a basic need to escape the drudgery of his lowly job and the insufferable Swelter. As novelist Sebastian Faulks argues, ‘Although Peake at once presents Steerpike as flawed and untrustworthy, his drive to self-betterment does not seem villainous’ (327). This judgement appears to be correct at least in the early stages, though the episode with Flay shows that Steerpike is a schemer from the very beginning, always looking to his own advantage. He is, like all picaresque heroes, a master at managing adverse circumstance. Thus, when Steerpike escapes from the room where Flay locks him up, possibly expecting the boy to starve to death in it, he crosses the dangerous roofscape of Gormenghast and reaches by accident the secret attic of Titus’s sister, moody, fifteenyear-old Fuchsia. In this unplanned encounter Steerpike shows that he is a fast learner and a fantastic actor. When the impractical girl pours slimy water from a flower vase onto Steerpike’s face for him to regain consciousness, he feels ‘sudden wrath and shock’ yet ‘his brain overpowered his anger, and he smiled hideously through the putrid scum’ (TG 111). Seeing in Fuchsia a romantic ‘simpleton’ (TG 113), Steerpike presents himself as a rebel seeking sanctuary and a ‘man of purpose’ (TG 114). The girl, initially distrustful, soon takes him to find employment with Dr. Prunesquallor, convinced that Steerpike is clever in a way she herself is not. Thus, his conquest of power begins. Later in their relationship, when Fuchsia has more serious misgivings, Steerpike explains to her his view of how society should work, a view totally at odds with his own behaviour. At this point of his villainous career, Steerpike is defending equality because he is not yet empowered. ‘There should be no rich, no poor, no strong, no weak’ (TG 210), he argues. Fuchsia remains unconvinced, not only because she is an aristocrat but also because Steerpike makes his case ‘methodically pulling the legs off a stag-beetle, one by one, as he spoke’ (TG 210). He insists that the situation is not fair ‘Because of greed and cruelty and lust for power. All that sort of thing must be stopped’ (TG 211). She, however, coolly replies that being himself cruel, he can hardly expect to stop cruelty, no matter how clever he is. In a second revealing conversation, once the young man sees that social equality can hardly appeal to Fuchsia and that his villainy is becoming apparent to her, Steerpike plays the card of youth. He persuades Fuchsia that figures of authority like old Barquentine, the new Master of Ritual replacing his father Sourdust, deserve their contempt. His rebelliousness makes the ugly boy attractive to Fuchsia’s eyes for the first time, since she is also in rebellion herself as a young woman. Steerpike teaches Fuchsia that being disrespectful to their envious elders

Steerpike, Angry Young Man  97 is not only acceptable but a positive value. He, however, delays for too long the decision to turn this budding alliance of the young against the old into an act of seduction that might aid him to access power; in the meantime, he and Fuchsia grow out of their youthful infatuation with rebellion, and with each other (at least on her side). At the point when this conversation takes place, Steerpike’s career in villainy has already gone through its main initial stages, narrated in Titus Groan. His ‘ingratiating manner’ (TG 135), ‘old trick of shameless flattery’ (TG 156), gallantry, and ability to learn fast have worked to his advantage. Steerpike ‘is essentially a cold Machiavellian craftsman’ with ‘the skill of entering into the very being of the characters he meets and giving them what they like’ (Manlove ‘Shaping’ 25). ‘You are a clever little monster’, Dr. Prunesquallor tells Steerpike, only to be disarmed by the boy’s candid reply: ‘That is what I hoped you would realize, Doctor’ (TG 127). His sister Irma, Peake’s unkind caricature of spinsterhood, feels titillated by ‘the ugly youth’ (TG 120),12 whose new black clothes she pays for. Steerpike, however, uses another kind of seduction to involve Lord ­Sepulchrave’s estranged twin sisters, Cora and Clarice, into his first truly villainous act: the burning of Gormenghast’s library. The ladies make no bones that they desire, above all, power to boss people around— the power they have been robbed of by Gormenghast’s patriarchal laws of succession, which privilege men. Quick to see the advantages of manipulating their grievances, Steerpike easily lures them into committing arson with the excuse that they have not been invited to the Great Gathering (a select party to welcome Titus into the family). The problem is that he cannot keep them silent afterwards. Their brother’s descent into madness after the fire and his subsequent disappearance plunge Cora and Clarice into a deep depression which, as also happens to Fuchsia, restores to them a sense of lost propriety in their dealings with the young villain. Steerpike is suddenly revealed to them as an undeserving young man. Cora secretly wishes to evict him because Steerpike is not ‘really of good stock like us and ought to be a servant’ (TG 285). Nothing in the two novels where he appears suggests that Peake disagrees with this judgement. The success of Steerpike’s social climbing is, as a matter of fact, conditioned by the library fire. He plans to rescue the Groans and his main servants to place the clan in his debt and cause a positive impression as a dashing young hero, in which he succeeds. The unintended death of the Master of Ritual, Sourdust, also provides an important opening into the patriarchal power structure of Gormenghast. Steerpike, however, is foiled on two fronts: Sourdust’s position, which Steerpike tries to occupy, is eventually offered to his stern elderly son Barquentine; on the other hand, the loss of his beloved books (which even Steerpike hates destroying) plunges Lord Sepulchrave into a terminal depression and empowers the infant Titus when the Earl goes missing. Steerpike partly

98  Steerpike, Angry Young Man solves his problems by becoming Barquentine’s apprentice thanks to the diligence which he shows in the search for the missing Sepulchrave (whose body, consumed by the owls he mimics in his madness, is never found). Steerpike, however, seriously mismanages his romance with Fuchsia, causing her and teen Titus to bond in self-defence against his wiles. The beginning of Steerpike’s downfall is caused by another fire, fuelled by his growing impatience. The kitchen boy is at this point a young man aged twenty-four and although he enjoys a position of prominence as Barquentine’s second in command, and even the old man’s ‘grudging respect’ (TG 325), his position is uncertain. The Master of Ritual claims that he has no son (though he eventually recalls that he is indeed a father) but, supposing that Barquentine chose Steerpike as his successor, Gormenghast’s narrow patriarchal tradition would prevent the upstart from being formally appointed. Titus Groan ends with Steerpike’s decision to eliminate Barquentine out of frustration and anger at his limitations, whereas his murder occupies a prominent space in the plot of Gormenghast. Barquentine fails to see that he is daily providing Steerpike with the information which he needs to replace him as Master of Ritual. The young man plans to eliminate his master and then become Gormenghast’s sole authority ‘in the minutiae of the law’ (G 492), so that he can fabricate the fake documents that will allow him to accrue as much power as he requires. He bides his time, meanwhile enjoying the ‘grotesque pleasure’ (G 204) of torturing Cora and Clarice. Steerpike announces their suicide, buries their wax effigies, and keeps them imprisoned in a remote corner of the castle under pretence that a plague runs free in its corridors, playing with them like a cat with the mice soon to be eaten. Oddly, though Steerpike has trained himself as a poisoner, he improvises his master’s murder, using a candlestick to set him on fire. Clinging to the killer with all his might, Barquentine burns Steerpike’s face badly, forcing him to plunge into the castle’s moat to be saved. There, Steerpike finally drowns Barquentine, presenting himself as the tragic victim of his failed rescue. This is his only entitlement to acting as the new Master of Ritual, an office he holds only provisionally and on endurance. His frightening new appearance, however, scares off any potential admirers. His strange appearance ‘had never encouraged intimacy even supposing he had ever courted it’ (G 596) but, quickly overcoming trauma, Steerpike realizes that ‘the reason for his disfigurement stood in his favour’ (G 596). As happened after the library fire, he enjoys ‘a grudging acceptance and even a kind of bitter admiration’ (G 597), which in any case are no comfort for his own bitterness at the way he mismanages Barquentine’s murder. Steerpike remains at least sane enough to plan the conquest of absolute power over the castle in about ten years, when he should be thirty-five. A sign, however, that his grip on reality is fast slipping is that he dreams of becoming a ‘kind of god’ (G 597) among the youth of Gormenghast.

Steerpike, Angry Young Man  99 He expects to be worshipped even by Titus, without realizing that the young Earl regards him as ‘the arch-symbol of all the authority and repression which he loathed’ (G 602). Titus is too young to recall his late father, he ignores that Steerpike is courting Fuchsia, and has not been abused by the young villain in any way but he still loathes Steerpike with all his might. Fuchsia accuses her brother of being ‘bigoted’ for at this point there is no evidence that Steerpike is a villain, yet Titus insists: ‘I hate the cheap and stinking guts of him’ (G 631). Redpath argues that Steerpike and Titus hate each other because the former ‘will have to destroy the Groans if he is to attain his goal of total power’ (68), including killing Titus. The young Earl, though, considers Steerpike his worst enemy before the villain ever thinks of Titus as a serious rival. Titus’s irrational abhorrence even feeds our ‘grudging’ sympathy for Steerpike, which should not happen since he is clearly a manipulative, cold-hearted villain and the boy the hero readers should be rooting for. Rather than confronting Titus directly, Steerpike apparently believes that the boy can be neutralized once he marries Fuchsia. ‘Everything conspires to make her vulnerable to the blandishments of the scheming Steerpike’ (Winnington Voice 45), as he knows well. Like her aunts Cora and Clarice, Fuchsia is firstly presented as a victim of her sexist patriarchal environment. The girl, then fifteen, is furious when a male heir is born because, as Nanny Slagg confesses to Keda, Titus’s wet nurse, Fuchsia ‘likes to dream that she’s the queen and that when the rest are dead there’ll be no one who can order her to do anything’ (TG 65). Slagg fears that one day Fuchsia will fulfil her threat to burn down Gormenghast, but Peake turns this budding anti-patriarchal rebel into a loving sister who relinquishes any dream of being Gormenghast’s ruler charmed by her baby brother. Steerpike understands that his conquest of power passes through seducing lonely, isolated Fuchsia but he downplays her loyalty to Titus. The seduction plan initially works well, since Steerpike can be a gentleman if he wishes and Fuchsia does not mind his uncommon physical appearance. Yet, it suddenly crumbles one night in a small incident, masterfully narrated by Peake. Their secret relationship is platonic, for sexuality is in Gormenghast, as Mason argues, atrophied and Steerpike ‘as cold and sexless as a shark’ (34). About to enter their private room in a dark corridor, Fuchsia lights a candle and the little flame startles Steerpike, who fears that they might be discovered too soon for him to succeed in his plans. He ‘whispered fiercely, “Fool!”’ (G 633) and thus their brittle bond shatters. Fuchsia, ‘shocked and resentful’, becomes ‘without her knowing it, Lady Fuchsia’ (G 633, original italics); her pride in her aristocratic blood, left aside during the courtship, suddenly flares and ‘now in bitterness she was again the daughter of an Earl’ (G 633). Steerpike’s mask slips and the face ‘ugly with anger’ (G 633) frees the young woman from her infatuation. Steerpike decides on the spot to rape Fuchsia the following evening and, in this way,

100  Steerpike, Angry Young Man blackmail his way into power but other events thwart this nasty plan of sexual domination. Steerpike’s demise is ultimately caused by the discovery of the dead bodies of Cora and Clarice, as well as by Fuchsia’s accidental death. Under the care of Dr. Prunesquallor to heal from the wounds received during Barquentine’s botched killing, Steerpike whispers a mysterious line, ‘And the twins will make it five!’ (G 630), which refers to the number of murders he has committed. Following this thin thread, and encouraged by Countess Gertrude, Prunesquallor, Flay, and Titus eventually find Steerpike staging a grotesque caper with the twins’ remains. The madness that starts with Barquentine’s murder finally grips Steerpike and, once unmasked, he becomes a fugitive in a long chase which takes place while torrential rains flood Gormenghast. This downfall seems more than justified by the villain’s crimes, but Peake makes a questionable choice by adding Fuchsia’s death to the rivalry between Titus and Steerpike. Understandably, the young woman contemplates suicide because once Steerpike’s murderous deeds are revealed she starts suspecting everyone else of being ‘double-faced and merciless’ (G 666). Peake, though, has Fuchsia die quite absurdly. Distracted from her gloomy reverie by a knock on the door, she slips off the windowsill where she is perched, knocks her skull, and subsequently drowns in the castle’s moat. It is hard to say what effect Peake intended to achieve with this dismal ending but, since Titus unfairly blames Steerpike for his sister’s death, his anger is further increased. Already seventeen at this point, Titus announces to his startled mother his intention to kill their enemy,13 mixing Steerpike’s crimes with his own hatred of his birthplace: ‘I want to be myself, and become what I make myself, a person, a real live person and not a symbol any more. That is my reason! (…) To hell with ­Gormenghast’ (G 714). Fuchsia’s death triggers Titus’s dormant courage, providing him with a new sense of manhood. He is ‘no longer just a man. He was that rarer thing, a man in motion’ (G 714)—a feeling which, of course, recalls Steerpike’s self-presentation to Fuchsia as a ‘man of purpose’. The villain is doomed not only by his crimes but, mainly, by his rival’s feeling that ‘A blind white rage had transformed him’ into a man very different from the ‘reserved and moody figurehead’ everyone assumed he was (G 714–715, my italics). Armed with this fearsome, seething anger, Titus kills Steerpike, who soon becomes ‘an almost ­legendary monster’ (G 748) in Gormenghast’s memory. Titus, in contrast, turns into ‘a legend; a living symbol of revenge’ (G 746). The facial scar left by the wound Steerpike inflicts, though, connects villain and hero for the rest of Titus’s life. The villain is ultimately defeated, Sanders argues, because ‘Steerpike uses Gormenghast’s tradition for his own ends, but by conforming to that tradition he denies his individual personality a chance to grow freely. His death shows the futile, self-destructive attempt to seize control’ (91, original italics). It is impossible to justify the atrocities which he

Steerpike, Angry Young Man  101 commits  or to celebrate any of his personal qualities, but in this extraordinary tale the patriarchal system of power is the main villain, above everyone else. Before Titus is born, Sepulchrave lives in constant anxiety that he will never be able to produce a male heir and thus fulfil his main patriarchal duty. The worst traits of his son Titus are due to the weight that patriarchy imposes on his shoulders, which is why he grows up to be such an angry young man. Steerpike himself is made angry by the rigid hierarchy, which denies meritocracy and favours the first-born sons of aristocratic families over any other gifted young man. Cora and Clarice are driven to insanity by their frustration, feeling, fairly or unfairly, that they are as entitled to power as their brother. Fuchsia is ignored by her father for not being a boy, and she is made so vulnerable by this neglect that even awful Steerpike seems a desirable romantic choice to her. Titus obsesses about gaining his freedom from patriarchy, but he never considers liberating his sister. Only Countess Gertrude seems minimally satisfied, until Titus decides to leave the ruins of flooded Gormenghast in her hands. Steerpike’s dictatorship could always have made the situation even worse but his villainy is clearly just a manifestation of a much deeper malady, which is equally inimical to villain and hero, ‘man of purpose’ and ‘man in motion’. Peake’s fable is, then, an accurate diagnosis of how patriarchy negatively affects both masculinity and femininity, but it is also another classic instance of the limits of the imagination to find an alternative. More worryingly, it is even a step backward in the characterization of the hero as a young man as angry as the villain, if not more.

Notes 1 I am following the timeline by G. Peter Winnington in the Peake Studies website (www.peakestudies.com/timeline.htm) and his biography, Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies. 2 In this novella—published in Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination (1956), together with William Golding’s ‘Envoy Extraordinary’ and John Wyndham’s ‘Consider her Ways’—the teen protagonist is simply called Boy, but the context suggests he can be certainly identified with Titus. Boy in Darkness was reissued in a stand-alone volume in 1976. 3 Titus Alone was reissued posthumously, in 1970, in a substantially revised version, edited by Langdon Jones. This is closer to the original manuscript than the mostly uncorrected 1959 version. Peake did not see his ‘Titus Novels’ as a trilogy but as an ongoing series interrupted by his severe illness. Peake’s widow, Maeve, wrote a fourth novel, Titus Awake, based on notes by her late husband. It was finally published in 2011, coinciding with the centennial celebrations of Peake’s birth. 4 Going further back than Savage, Fowler stresses that ‘the emergence of a distinctive teenage culture’ in Britain was not a post-war process but a product ‘of the inter-war years’ (1). 5 The expression ‘rebel without a cause’ was popularized by the James Dean eponymous film (1955) but originates in the title of the study by American psychiatrist Robert M. Linder, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis

102  Steerpike, Angry Young Man of a Criminal Psychopath (1944). The autobiography by British journalist and political activist Leslie Allen Paul, Angry Young Man (1951), was a source for the label attached to the literary movement, even though Paul’s dissatisfaction had little to do with the ennui depicted in the plays and novels of his contemporaries. 6 See also Colin Wilson’s memoir The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (2007). 7 Greene, a close friend of Peake’s, was the first reader of Titus Groan. His very negative reaction led Peake to rework the manuscript substantially. His novel was finally published by Eyre and Spottiswoode, where Greene worked as an editor. 8 In Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940–1980 Booth writes that during the 1940s, ‘the train of fantasy, which had always been present in English literature, was continued by C.S. Lewis, Mervyn Peake, J.R.R. Tolkien and T.H. White, though all these used the basic conventions of realism to describe fantastic subjects’ (48). The truly experimental novelists, he explains, were silenced around 1953 ‘and only reawakened when the “angry” novel began its decline, which it inevitably did’ (53). Booth names among the ‘experimentalists’ (54) William Golding, John Fowles, John Berger, Lawrence Durrell, Brigid Brophy, and Nigel Dennis. I would agree that Peake uses a form of realism in his fantasy but, even so, his ‘Titus Novels’ are experimental in content, in ways quite alien to Tolkien’s far more traditional The Lord of the Rings. 9 This is disputable since young Alex is quite content with his criminal lifestyle: the authorities and the society they represent are angry with him, hence the brutal course of re-education he is subjected to. 10 The theme of the youthful gangster reappears, as I will show in Chapter 8, in the confrontation between Big Ger Cafferty and the upstart Darryl Christie. 11 She also connects Steerpike to classic Gothic villainy, for ‘His eyes are a variation on the magnetic, hypnotic dark eyes of a Melmoth or a Montoni’ (64). 12 The 2000 BBC adaptation, Gormenghast (directed by Andy Wilson from a script by Malcolm McKay), substantially departed from Steerpike’s original characterization by casting attractive actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the villain. Michael Lacey saves Meyers from his general disappointment with the series, claiming that his Steerpike ‘is more of a theatrical pillock than he is in the book, but his ruthlessness, manipulation and cunning are all engagingly on show’ (43). British author Neil Gaiman announced in April 2018 his intention to produce a new adaptation for television. Comparing this project to the adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction, Gaiman declared that it was ‘an honour to have been given the opportunity to help shepherd Peake’s brilliant and singular vision to the screen’ (in Flood n.p. online). 13 If Boy in Darkness must be considered part of Titus’s biography, then it must be noted that in this novella he clashes against a brutal, grotesque villain, whom he slaughters. The Boy escapes on his fourteenth birthday to enjoy for once freedom but he gets entangled in a horrifying misadventure, which ‘only results in exposure to a different tyranny’ (Mills 202). Picked up by Goat and Hyena he is led to the underground realm of the blind Lamb, a non-human reverse Dr. Moreau who enjoys turning humans into animals out of pure malice. Playing a clever trick on him, Titus destroys the Lamb but is astonished to find nothing inside his bright white fleece. The Boy returns home and quickly forgets the events, which perhaps should be ‘best considered a dream’ (Boerem & Seland, 18) or, rather, nightmare. If this is the case, then Steerpike is the first villain he eliminates and not the second.

Steerpike, Angry Young Man  103

Works Cited Allsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade. London: Peter Owen, 1958. Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960. BBC Channel. ‘Joanne Harris Discusses Steerpike—Faulks on Fiction: The Villain, Preview. BBC Two’. YouTube 18 February 2011. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Jm7XxvcIbJU. Video. Bentley, Nick. Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s. Oxford, etc.: Peter Lang, 2007. Boerem, R. & John Seland. ‘The Imagery of “Boy in Darkness”’. Peake Studies 4.2 (Spring 1995): 5–20. Booth, Francis. Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940– 1980 (1982). Internet: Lulu.com, 2012. Burgess, Anthony. ‘Introduction’. Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968. 9–13. Carpenter, Humphrey. The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s. London: Penguin and Allen Lane, 2002. Crowley, Matthew. ‘Angry Young Men? A Product of their Time’. The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe & Nick Hubble (eds.). London, etc.: Bloomsbury, 2019. 53–80. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield (1849–1850). Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Eckstein, Simon. ‘“There Is No Place Like Home”: Reflective Nostalgia in Titus Groan and Gormenghast’. Miracle Enough: Papers on the Works of Mervyn Peake, G. Peter Winnington (ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 93–104. Elber-Aviram, Hadas. ‘Dark and Deathless Rabble of Long Shadows: Peake, Dickens, Tolkien, and “This Dark Hive Called London”’. Peake Studies 14.2 (April 2015): 6–31. Faulks, Sebastian. ‘Villains. A Problem Case: Steerpike’. Faulks on Fiction: Great British Characters and the Secret Life of the Novel. London: BBC Books, 2011. 327–334. Ferrebe, Alice. Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. ———. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000: Keeping It Up. ­Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Flood, Alison. ‘Neil Gaiman to Produce Gormenghast Adaptation for TV’. The Guardian 4 April 2018. www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/04/neilgaiman-to-produce-gormenghast-adaptation-for-tv-mervyn-peake Fowler, David. The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain. London & New York: Routledge, 2013. François, Pierre. ‘Stasis and Rebellion in Gormenghast: Part III-Rebellion (Eros)’. Peake Studies 11.2 (April 2009): 33–52. ———. ‘Stasis and Rebellion in Gormenghast: Part I (Stasis)’. Peake Studies 10.3 (October 2007): 5–23. Gardiner-Scott, Tanya J. Mervyn Peake: The Evolution of a Dark Romantic. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Johnson, Ian. ‘Despite His Evil Actions’. Peake Studies 7.2 (April 2001): 9–18.

104  Steerpike, Angry Young Man Kennedy, Maev. ‘Mervyn Peake’s War Paintings Unveiled by National Archives’. The Guardian 22 July 2011. www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jul/22/mervynpeake-paintings-national-archives Lacey, Michael. ‘The BBC Gormenghast Revisited’. Peake Studies 10.3 (October 2007): 41–44. Manlove, Colin. ‘Shaping in Titus Groan’. Miracle Enough: Papers on the Works of Mervyn Peake, G. Peter Winnington (ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 21–32. ———. ‘Rebel without a Cause: The Cultural Matrix of the Titus Books’. Peake Studies 7.4 (April 2008): 7–18. ———. ‘Mervyn Peake: The ‘Titus’ Trilogy’. Modern Fantasy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975. 207–257. Mason, Desmond. ‘Atrophied Sexuality in Gormenghast’. Peake Studies 4.2 (Spring 1995): 33–38. Miéville, China. ‘Introduction’. The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake. London: Vintage Books, 2011. Ix–xii. Mills, Alice. Stuckness in the Fiction of Mervyn Peake. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Morgan, Edwin. ‘The Walls of Gormenghast: An Introduction to the Novels of Mervyn Peake’. Chicago Review 14.3 (1960): 74–81. Paul, Leslie. Angry Young Man. London: Faber & Faber, 1951. Peake, Mervyn. Boy in Darkness (1956). London and Chicago, IL: Peter Owen, 2011 (2007). ———. The Gormenghast Trilogy: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone (1946, 1950, 1959). London: Vintage, 1990. Redpath, Philip. ‘Mervyn Peake’s Black House: An Allegory of Mind and Body’. ARIEL 20.1 (January 1989): 57–74. Roberts, Adam. ‘Review of Collected Poems by Mervyn Peake’. Strange Horizons 4 August 2008. www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2008/08/collected_ poems.shtml Sanders, Joseph L. ‘“The Passions in the Clay”: Mervyn Peake’s Titus Stories’. Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, Volume 3, Thomas D. Clareson & Thomas Wymer (eds.). Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1984. 75–105. Savage, Jon. Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875–1945. London: Penguin, 2008. Watney, John. ‘Introduction’. Peake’s Progress, Maeve Gilmore (ed.). Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 1981. 13–34. Wilson, Colin. The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men. London: Robson Books, 2007. Winnington, G. Peter. Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies: The Illustrated Biography. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2009 (2000). ———. The Voice of the Heart: The Working of Mervyn Peake’s Imagination. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2006.

5 Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Larger than Life The Villain in the James Bond Series

The Bond Villain: Providing a Norm of Badness James Bond is still a central icon in British popular culture thanks to ‘a large vocal fandom’ (Kinane n.p. online) and despite rising opposition to the values he embodies. Already in its twenty-fifth instalment, the film series inspired by Ian Fleming’s spy fiction has been struggling in the four more recent films, with Daniel Craig,1 to present a Bond better suited for current times: less misogynistic, racist, or homophobic, still a patriot but also a political sceptic, and, above all, a man less comfortable with his masculinity than the overtly patriarchal Bonds of the past. The chameleonic Bond franchise is the specific product of a time but also a cultural phenomenon in constant need of updating, which is why no solid prediction can be made about how and for how long it will survive. For these reasons, revisiting the original novels to assess how Bond has evolved is always a salutary exercise. Tony Bennett argues that the Bond phenomenon calls for an intertextual approach. The multimedia ‘texts of Bond’ should be studied, he insists, ‘in the light of the ways in which the relations between them have been ordered and reordered at different moments in Bond’s career as a popular hero’ (16). Bond scholarship, nonetheless, focuses mainly on the films, neglecting the novels either by Fleming or by his successors2 with very few exceptions. Among them, Imelda Whelelan approaches the original novels as a feminist reader resisting the Bond mystique to consider how they ‘articulate a pervasive and persistent anxiety about patriarchy, masculinity and moral justice’ which ‘underpins some of the tensions of Bond’s 00 status’ (111). This is also the foundation of my reading. Masculinity is under constant scrutiny in the Bond novels and the villains are the main judges, often as 007’s torturers. Adams claims that ‘The hegemonic British masculinity of which Bond is an image is r­ evealed as resistant’ to the twin threats of Communism and homosexuality ‘through Bond’s resistance to torture’ (138). According to Banner, Bond ‘exerts a pull on the villains that is stronger than their own ambitions’ (122); their unfulfilled desire for his body allows Bond to survive and defeat them. Fleming, nevertheless, also uses his villains to criticize his

106  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld protagonist. The villain I analyse here, Ernest Stavro Blofeld, tells Bond that he is just ‘a common thug, a blunt instrument wielded by dolts in high places’, blindly obeying his bosses ‘out of some mistaken idea of duty or patriotism’ (You Only Live Twice 192). This is a correct judgment. Without M’s call to action whenever the villains’ actions threaten the United Kingdom, Bond would have no heroic mission to fulfil, for he seems hardly interested in ethics or justice. Bond may be a valued agent in the service which his nation maintains to control villainy but the ones with real agency are always the colourful villains. They obey no other man but themselves. Fleming’s villains are classifiable into two main groups: those connected with the Soviet Union through Joseph Stalin’s SMERSH (Spetsialnye Metody Razoblacheniya Shpionov, or Special Methods of Spy Detection) and the villains emerging once this organization was dismantled. This happened in 1953 following the deaths of Stalin and of his main henchman, Lavrentiy Beria, and the subsequent rise to power of Nikita Khrushchev. ‘Soon’, Price comments, ‘with Khrushchev preaching peaceful coexistence, it became harder to justify the Soviet Union as Bond-villain’ (28). Fleming does tie his topical novels to historical events, but his plots are pure fantasy in pulp fiction style. Not only Dr. No, with his half-oriental villain, but generally the whole Bond saga is heavily indebted to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series. They even overlapped: Emperor Fu Manchu, Rohmer’s last novel, was published in 1959 and Fleming’s Bond novels appeared mainly in the 1950s, beginning with Casino Royale (1953). Certainly, the 1960s novels have a slightly different flavour, due to the beginning of the Khrushchev-led second phase of the Cold War. Nonetheless, the Blofeld trilogy—Thunderball (1961), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and You Only Live Twice (1964)— offers, as I aim to show, plenty of bizarre, pulpish storytelling. Fleming’s formulaic novels always include an info-dump summarizing the villain’s biography and career, often shaped as a file which Bond peruses. ‘If we admit Bond to our fantasy world’, Kingsley Amis writes, ‘we need a more-than-life-size figure for him to cope with and overthrow’ (67), a figure that can fill in properly those sizeable files. Each villain’s uniqueness is proclaimed through a physical description which ‘runs to extremes’ because this is ‘where, of course, the most memorable features of male physique and physiognomy are to be found’ (Amis 65). Rubio contends that despite their singular appearance the villains ‘blend together’ because ‘the category of the villain has become more important than the actual villains’ (94). This is certainly the case though there is no contradiction in claiming that each villain is a singular creation within the general encompassing stereotype. The typical Bond villain is a middle-aged man: Dr. Julius No, presumably past sixty, is the oldest one and Francisco Scaramanga, not yet forty, the youngest. The villain has a remarkable, ogreish appearance and,

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  107 frequently, ‘a physical impairment that limits him physical and/or socially (as he is perceived as being “freakish”)’ (Funnell & Dodds 25).3 Most Bond villains are big men quite capable of using violence, including, as noted, torture. Their sexuality is always warped, whether this leans towards abstinence or to womanizing, with some specific vices. Le Chiffre is a flagellant, Goldfinger enjoys painting his female partners’ bodies with golden paint. Black argues that whereas Bond ‘gives, as well as receives, pleasure. This is an ability and desire that can be imagined of few of the male villains’ (World 48). The films, however, tend to represent the villains as less sexualized than they are in the novels. Blofeld, an asexual man in the films, is in a relationship in the novels, which he and girlfriend Irma Bunt appear to find satisfactory. The Bond villain ‘is the true, perhaps insoluble, mystery at the heart of the narrative, the Being whose personality fills the vacuum that is James Bond with what seems like a dose of character’ (Woodward 185, original upper case). The villains’ backstories—set between the 1920s and the 1950s—are all far more thrilling than their distinctive clash with their MI6 nemesis. There is much material in these compressed tales for many first-rate thrillers. Fleming’s villains are megalomaniac individuals verging on insanity, but they are also greedy criminals, usually with an extraordinary ability to do business, both legitimate and illegitimate. WWII has a great impact on the lives of these ambitious men, who mostly treat this conflict as a career booster, in more or less public ways depending on their understanding of privacy. Dr. No is obdurately reclusive but other villains combine a very public presence with a villainous secret life. Hugo Drax, an ex-Nazi plotting to destroy London with a nuclear missile, should be read as Fleming’s warning against the popular figure of the billionaire entrepreneur that obeys no law but his own. Bond’s villains use their criminal actions to accrue power, fulfilling their ambition on a personal basis even when they are part of large organizations like SMERSH and follow specific ideologies. They do not see themselves as tyrants, but as independent businessmen placed above the law and, especially, above the herd—a Nietzschean phrase that often surfaces in the novels. Most critics highlight the fact that Bond’s villains are foreigners, often of mixed non-British origin, with only Hugo Drax being half-­English on his mother’s side. Le Chiffre’s is of unknown origins, Mr. Big is FrenchHaitian, twins Jack and Seraffimo Spang are Italo-American, Dr. Julius No is German-Chinese, Blofeld is Polish-Greek, Goldfinger is Latvian, and Scaramanga is of Catalan origins. This is habitually read as a sign of the xenophobia ingrained in the series, with Bond standing in for Englishness. James Bond, nevertheless, is himself of mixed non-­English origins: his father was Scottish and his mother from Switzerland. His Swiss half does not interest Bond particularly but his Scottishness is an important part of his characterization in the novels (overlapping with

108  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld the choice of Scottish actor Sean Connery to play Bond in the earliest films). Bond, educated at Eton, has apparently a standard upper-­middleclass English accent but he admits that ‘there was something alien and un-English about himself’ (Moonraker 44), which makes his having to go undercover in England an impossible task. Abroad he is taken for the quintessential ‘limey’, as his CIA colleague Felix Leiter and other Americans call him, but though Bond is British he is most emphatically not English. In his national hybridity Bond is, then, closer to his villains than to his quintessentially English boss, M. While black Mr. Big and Eurasian Dr. No are exceptions in the white normativity of the Bond villain, Russian villainess Rosa Klebb is the exception to the masculine norm. The other most conspicuous villainess in Fleming’s novels, Pussy Galore—Auric Goldfinger’s accomplice and the leader of an improbable all-female burglar gang—highlights the deep lesbophobia of the series. Galore’s initial patriarchal lust for power is transformed in the novel Goldfinger into submissive lust for macho Bond, who supposedly cures this woman of her natural inclinations. Klebb’s presentation in From Russia with Love is quite different, revealing not only Fleming’s sexism but also his strong prejudice against unattractive women, which constitutes a specific type of what is now called lookism. The features of the male villain are also conditioned by the generalized rejection of ugliness, though not by androphobia, whereas Klebb’s characterization is undeniably misogynistic, compounded with Fleming’s confusion about sexuality. Klebb, who is supposedly bisexual, is presented as a lascivious lesbian seducer, eliciting disgust and fear from her intended target, the heroine Tatiana. Yet, sex is said to be for Klebb just an ‘itch’ and her bisexuality a ‘psychological and physiological neutrality’ that ‘relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires’ (FRWL 86). Klebb succeeds in her attempt to poison Bond before being herself eliminated because, unlike most women, she feels only cool indifference for him. Fleming, in short, confuses asexuality with bisexuality and uses, as happens in Pussy Galore’s case, lesbophobic prejudice to characterize the unattractive villainess. Klebb’s role as a woman’s intent on conquering power does not contradict the critique of patriarchy which I am developing here—quite the opposite. As ‘Head of Otdyel II, the department of SMERSH in charge of Operations and Executions’ (FRWL 74), Klebb is ‘one of the most powerful women in the State, and certainly the most feared’ (FRWL 85). Despite many advances in equality, the former USSR combined Communism with patriarchy allowing women with Klebb’s lust for power to join the Darwinian squabble for the positions of authority only within narrow boundaries limited by a glass ceiling similar to the one in the capitalist block. Klebb’s unappealing femaleness and threatening power are part of the representation of the Soviet Union as a political enemy yet, as a woman, she could never have shattered the patriarchal

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  109 restrictions of the USSR and eventually head SMERSH, much less the true centre of power: the Politburo. The power which the male Bond villains wield is outside her reach, though Klebb is positively far more powerful than cartoonish villainess Pussy Galore. Fleming’s discourse on patriarchal villainy, though superficial, is remarkably coherent. ‘The Nature of Evil’, Chapter 20 in the first novel Casino Royale, contains a most explicit discussion. Bond convalesces after being cruelly tortured by the sadistic villain Le Chiffre and discusses the case with Mathis, his friend in the Deuxième Bureau, the French secret service. As a schoolboy, Bond notes, he could tell villains and heroes apart with no difficulty, and so he determined to be a hero; as an adult he finds, however, that both categories ‘get all mixed up’ (159). His role as an executioner sanctioned by the British Government and his confrontation with Le Chiffre, considered a hero by his proSoviet French sympathizers, forces Bond to reconsider his own position. He appears to defend a relativistic stance: calling Le Chiffre evil is justified ‘because he did evil things to me’ but Bond warns that he would never take revenge ‘for some high moral reason or for the sake of my country’ (160), only for personal reasons. He complains that in building the notions of good and evil, as God and the Devil, most energy has gone into understanding good: the Bible teaches goodness but nobody has produced an ‘Evil Book’ dealing with ‘how to be bad’ (161). His sympathy for the underdog makes Bond hesitate about which position he should defend, a doubt which leads to a quite idiosyncratic consideration of how morality works. Le Chiffre, he argues, played a fundamental role: ‘By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men’. (162, my italics) Mathis sensibly advices Bond to embrace the company of ordinary ­ eople, for ‘They are easier to fight for than principles’ (164), adding p laughingly that Bond himself should never become human since ‘We would lose such a wonderful machine’ (164). In his celebrated analysis of the Bond novels, Umberto Eco argues that Mathis does convince Bond ‘to abandon the treacherous life of moral meditation and of psychological anger, with all the neurotic dangers that they entail’ (35) so that he becomes simply a cog in a well-greased narrative machinery. The overt discussion of evil, morality, and power dwindles in the following novels, as Eco observes, but does not completely disappear. Apart from the arguments that Blofeld develops in You Only Live Twice regarding his own villainy, other villains discuss power with

110  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld Bond. In Live and Let Die Mr. Big (Buonaparte Ignace Gallia) explains that when personal lust for power is fulfilled in maturity ‘accidie’, defined as ‘the deadly lethargy that envelops those who are sated, those who have no more desires’ (LLD 93), sets in. Since he feels that he cannot ‘possibly acquire more power in another sphere than I already possess in this one’ (93), his chosen field, Mr. Big has started running his operations as ‘a work of art, bearing my signature as clearly as the creations of, let us say, Benvenuto Cellini’ (94). Moonraker’s Sir Hugo Drax (originally Graf Hugo von der Drache) might be a suitable critic or judge of this forbidding art, for he shares with Mr. Big the conviction that any delusions of grandeur are ‘The triumph of the maniac who knows that whatever the facts may say he is right’ (MR 104). No villain takes the word ‘maniac’ as an insult. Julius No tells Bond that ‘All the greatest men are maniacs’ (Dr No 161) for a simple reason: ‘What else but a blind singleness of purpose could have given focus to their genius, would have kept them in the groove of their purpose?’ (161). Dr. No openly acknowledges that ‘a mania for power’ (161) motivates him and, above all, his view that power guarantees personal sovereignty. Bond mocks his marginal existence on his guano-producing Caribbean island, but the villain obstinately defends his ‘freedom of action’ (161) in this hidden fortress; his lifestyle, he stresses, allows him to enjoy a total autonomy, denied to more powerful men including heads of state. Dr. No aims at enjoying total power over his own land and people in the style of his admired Stalin but, as Bond counterargues, ‘your search for power is an illusion because power itself is an illusion’ (162). The figure of the solitary villain ready to wreak havoc worldwide from a secret base, aided by complying minions, was the stuff of popular fiction during the Cold War (1945–1989) but took on new, urgent relevance after the tragic events of 9/11 in 2001. Writing a few days after the attacks, Slavoj Žižek contended that their impact shattered the illusion of a safe First World protected from the ‘Outside’, that is, from the Third World, and raised new fears ‘that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction’ (273). From this perspective, Osama Bin Laden suddenly appeared to be ‘the real-life counterpart of Ernst Stavro Blofeld’ (273). Bond scholars agree, emphasizing a new awareness of how we are watched not only by ‘invisible masterminds, geniuses like Blofeld’ but also by supposedly democratic Governments ‘prone to respond to surveillance with even more surveillance. (…) That’s what Fleming might tell us about a post 9/11 world—about its specters and structures of feeling’ (Watt 258). Bin Laden and Blofeld teach us an important ‘Hegelian lesson’ about the world from the mid-1960s to our days: ‘in this pure Outside’, where they are found, ‘we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence’ (Žižek 273). The villain, real-­ life or fictional, is not an exceptional disturbance at the margins of the current system of power but its consequence. Terrorism might never

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  111 conquer world power, but the villain lashes out anyway from his lair to make Earth a darker place than it already is. This is satisfaction enough for the patriarchal villains who understand, with total lucidity, that the powers presenting themselves as the heroic essence of civilization—the United States that keeps Guantanamo open and that executed Bin Laden with no trial in 2011, Bond’s complicit Britain4 —are actually even more powerful villains than they can ever dream of being.

Thunderball: Another Villain, Another Hero The narrative arc about Blofeld begins with Thunderball, a novel5 in which Bond never meets him. Blofeld appears in a couple of early chapters to be replaced roughly mid-book by his Italian associate Emilio Largo. In the joint blackmail operation which they run, Blofeld’s codename is No. 2 and Largo’s No. 1, which implies that Largo is the main villain. However, Blofeld’s detailed biographical background is much longer and we may assume that he is Fleming’s focus of interest. Bond’s investigation centres, at any rate, on Largo and leads to a remarkable plot twist which gives a woman, Domino, the role of hero. Bond stumbles upon Blofeld quite by chance. Concerned by his addictions to alcohol and tobacco, M sends his agent to a health clinic. There Bond clashes with Count Lippe, a secondary villain in a sophisticated plot run by a crime syndicate unknown to MI6 or any other Western intelligence agency: SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion). Unlike its predecessor SMERSH, SPECTRE has no basis in the 1960s history. The Soviets ‘were a traditional enemy with traditional objectives’ but SPECTRE is an unpredictable foe ‘with no reason for its existence but domination’ (Price 28–29).6 Blofeld’s brainchild SPECTRE is ‘an assembly of free-lance villains, which seeks to exploit the fragility of the relations between East and West, holding one or the other or sometimes both to ransom, for the purpose of private gain’ (Bennett & Woollacott 33). The word ‘Terrorism’ appears in its denomination and accurately describes what the organization does, though ‘Extortion’ seems even more accurate. The plot starts unfolding properly when SPECTRE announces to the main Western Governments that it possesses two atomic bombs, which it threatens to dump on two unnamed key locations unless a staggering amount of gold bullion is transferred to its members. Blofeld has no specific political ideology but his ‘machinations, in sowing the seeds of misunderstanding between Russia and the West, might result in a global conflagration’ (Bennett & Woollacott 33). In Thunderball, Fleming presents Blofeld as a charismatic leader in the sense that Webber described and Ian Kershaw applied to Hitler, one of the ‘rare men’ in possession of three key features: ‘their physical appearance is extraordinary, they have a quality of relaxation, of inner

112  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld certainty, and they exude a powerful animal magnetism’ (TB 44). Matheson reads Blofeld’s appeal as proof that ‘Fleming’s Cold War is an exercise in Social Darwinism played out on a global scale’ (65). Nietzsche is a more relevant reference: the third-person narrator notes that ‘the herd has always recognized the other-worldliness of [the] phenomena’ (44) by which primitive tribes chose their leaders. These ‘attributes’ characterized ‘great men of history’ like Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon: ‘Perhaps’, the narrator continues, ‘they even explain the hypnotic sway of an altogether more meagre individual, the otherwise inexplicable Adolf Hitler, over eighty million of the most gifted nation in Europe’ (44). Blofeld controls a select coterie of twenty jaded villains who respect him as ‘their Supreme Commander—almost their god’ (44). This contradicts Comentale’s view of Blofeld as a leader who ‘presides over the group only as a specter, as a structural device, which each man in turn despises’ (17). Blofeld is not just a mastermind (like Goldfinger) but a man who inspires loyalty among other powerful villains, and, thus, properly speaking an arch-villain. Cynically, his Paris headquarters are the address for FIRCO, the Fraternité Internationale de la Résistance Contre l’Oppression, the exact opposite of what SPECTRE represents except for the idea of brotherhood. Blofeld’s exclusively male circle is, he stresses, ‘a dedicated fraternity whose strength lies entirely in the strength of each member’ (TB 54). This band of relatively young men, mostly in their thirties, consists of individuals with ‘the eyes of the wolves and the hawks that prey upon the herd’ (TB 48–49, my italics). They are a selection of pan-European topranking criminals, motivated either by greed or by ideology. Blofeld’s anti-Arthurian round table welcomes the Italian Unione Siciliano, the French Union Corse, the leftovers of SMERSH, the remnants of Gestapo’s Sonderdienst, some members of Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavian Secret Police, and a few Turkish agents from Blofeld’s Middle East combined drug-smuggling and spy operations. This villainous rainbow crew uses SPECTRE to fund their criminal pursuits. Plan Omega is the last in a series of actions staged in the previous three years. The gang has shown remarkable criminal flexibility, robbing and blackmailing victims of all descriptions, from Nazis to Napoli gangsters passing through the East German secret service and even Bond’s own British Secret Service, which was forced to pay £100,000 against the threat of bioweapons engineered by the rogue Communist Czech state. According to Spence, Bond’s enemies are ‘composites combining bits and pieces of real persons with purely imaginary elements’ (226). He names self-styled dark wizard Aleister Crowley, master spy Sidney Reilly, and mystery adventurer Basil Zaharoff as evidence that the flamboyant villains are not ‘just Fleming’s fancies’ (226). Blofeld indeed borrows elements of these three men. When Bond first meets him, he

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  113 looks as Crowley did when Fleming met him: ‘a once powerful man whose physicality had gone to seed’ (Spence 218). Reilly, like Blofeld, ‘deliberately tried to erase his past, dabbled in stock market speculation, and ruthlessly played all sides to his advantage’ (221), whereas Zaharoff combined being honoured for war services with running ‘shadowy organizations’ even ‘far more successful’ than Blofeld (226). This is intriguing though it is equally valid to name other significant literary influences. The allusions in You Only Live Twice to Bram Stoker’s Eastern European Count Dracula present him as a likely source of inspiration for Fleming. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Blofeld’s obsessively claims, obviously with no legitimate grounds, that he is by rights a Count, Balthazar de Bleuville. Born in 1908, thus fifty-three when he is first introduced, Blofeld is supposedly the son of a Polish man and a Greek woman, a non-­Western European though not pure Slav as he is frequently described. His career begins in his native Poland, where he takes degrees in economics, political history, engineering, and radionics, proving that he is a man of ‘quite outstanding genius’ (YOLT 61). This mixed humanist and technological training allows Blofeld to understand that the fastest way to acquire power is by controlling communication; hence, he focuses on trading in information as the fastest path to success. Aged twentyfive he starts, in 1933, a prosperous illegal business of this type using a variety of private spy rings. His job at the Polish Central Post Office helps him to increase his earnings at the Warsaw Bourse. Once WWII begins, he starts selling military secrets to the highest bidder, regardless of the side. Blofeld amasses a fortune and ends ‘the war in a blaze of glory and prosperity and with decorations or citations from the British, Americans, and French’ (TB 47). Aware that Communism might hinder his plans, Blofeld flees to Turkey where he is welcome as a political refuge and establishes RAHIR. He still heads this organization by the time he founds SPECTRE, in 1958. ‘Blofeld’s gaze’, Fleming writes, ‘was a microscope, the window on the world of a superbly clear brain’ and of ‘an inner self-assurance built upon a lifetime of success in whatever he had attempted’ (TB 48). Winder protests that Blofeld is ‘an almost featureless invention’ in the films and that in the novels ‘there is effectively nothing to remember about him’ (205). This vagueness is partly due to his shifting physical appearance,7 which connects with his characterization as a villain who uses many different identities over the years. A necessary bodily constant is his imposing size: even Bond ‘had to admit that there was something larger than life in the looming, imperious figure’ (YOLT 193, my italics). Blofeld, ‘an amateur weight-lifter in his youth’ (TB 48), is still a massive man, though his once muscled body is now soft; he hides ‘a vast belly’ by wearing ‘roomy trousers and well-cut double-breasted suits’ (48). His pointed hands, conceivably another nod to Count Dracula, are a

114  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld distinctive feature. His unusual black eyes, the narrator points out, are like Mussolini’s: the dark pupil surrounded by ‘very clear whites’ produces a ‘doll-like effect’ (47). Blofeld’s gaze conveys trustworthy self-confidence to his admirers but is also a formidable tool to unmask deceivers. There is ‘no sign of debauchery, illness, or old age on the large, white, bland face under the square, wiry black crew-cut’ (48) and the jaw line, ‘going to the appropriate middle-aged fat of authority, showed decision and independence’ (48). Blofeld’s mouth, ‘under a heavy, squat nose, marred what might have been the face of a philosopher or a scientist. Proud and thin, like a badly healed wound, the compressed, dark lips, capable only of false, ugly smiles, suggested contempt, tyranny, and cruelty—but to an almost Shakespearian degree’ (48). Blofeld’s nose, here intact, shows in the later novels syphilitic scarring inconsistent with his presentation in Thunderball. In this novel, his asexuality and frugality (he does not smoke, drink, or eat much) seem positively Hitlerian: ‘So far as vices or physical weaknesses were concerned, Blofeld had always been an enigma to everyone who had known him’ (48). The threat that Blofeld poses in Thunderball corresponds to still extant anxieties arising in the late 1950s. By that time, atomic bombs were already small enough to be transported by ordinary-looking individuals who would raise no suspicions, as James Bond and the MI6 fear. ‘Every tin-pot little nation’ (76) and any criminal-minded scientist might hold the world to ransom, as Blofeld does. He is assisted in his terrorist plans by two Communist defectors: Kotze, an East German physicist, and Maslov, a Polish specialist in electronics. With them, Fleming makes the point that anyone can be recruited by villains like Blofeld for money and in the absence of any ideological motivation. Plan Omega is devised by Blofeld but implemented by his ­subordinates— mainly Largo, who could be called Blofeld’s weak lieutenant. With Largo, a ‘conspicuously handsome’ man (TB 98) in his early forties,8 Fleming hints that each historical period inevitably reproduces the same criminal type. Largo has the looks of an ancient Roman; in the 18th century, he would have been ‘a bloodstained cutthroat’ (99) similar to Blackbeard. Like his SPECTRE peers, he is a predator with ‘a cool brain and an exquisite finesse behind his actions’ which has so far allowed him to avoid ‘the herd’s revenge’ (99). Whether as a leading black marketeer in Naples during WWII, a smuggler, or a jewel thief, Largo always escapes attention to the point that he has no official criminal record. He is ‘the epitome of the gentleman crook—a man of the world, a great womanizer, a high liver’ (99) and a rich man, who lives for adventure. Largo makes ‘a fetish of calm’ (99), which seduces his partners in crime, eliciting their unconditional submission and allegiance. The patriarchal fraternity of villains headed by Blofeld is ultimately defeated by Largo’s uncontrolled sexuality. His kept mistress, Dominetta Vitali, eventually becomes Largo’s nemesis instead of Bond. An actress

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  115 by profession, Domino is presented as a liberated ‘girl of authority and character’ who chooses her men ‘on her terms and not on theirs’ (TB 115). Bond guesses that Domino uses her body to survive after suddenly losing her upper-class status for reasons unspecified. When Bond meets her, she is tired of her deal with Largo though she seems free to end the relationship with no acrimony. Largo is quite ready to replace her, if she so wishes. Bond sees his conquest of Domino in terms of patriarchal possession but, unexpectedly, Fleming presents Domino as an alternative hero, quite capable, unlike Bond, of ending Largo’s career. In fact, both SPECTRE’s terrorist plot and Fleming’s fictional plot hinge on a minor villain in a key role: Domino’s brother, Giuseppe Petacchi. A brilliant aviator since WWII, Petacchi is also a man dominated by ‘a passion for owning things—flashy, exciting, expensive things’ (86). Only thirty-four, he has decided to retire and enjoy the high life, leaving Domino to survive as best she can. Blofeld promises Pettachi a small fortune and a new passport for stealing the Vindicator, a NATO airplane carrying two atomic bombs. Suspecting no ill-will, he lands the aircraft near Bahamas, following Largo’s instructions, and is immediately murdered by him. His death becomes then a central element in a melodramatic plot twist. Seeking revenge, Domino accepts to help Bond by spying on Largo and she becomes in this way the accidental hero in Thunderball. Domino’s role breaks several conventions. The secondary villain, Largo, is the object of her rage rather than the main villain, Blofeld, though he is ultimately responsible for her brother’s Faustian bargain. Bond, nominally the hero, fails repeatedly to fulfil the mission and when he finally faces the villain, it is Domino who kills Largo after rescuing Bond from impending death. In previous novels, Bond is tortured by the villain, but in Thunderball Domino is the victim tortured by Largo when she is exposed as a spy, which logically increases her wish to take revenge. She succeeds but gets no reward. In hospital because of the abuse endured, Domino receives Bond’s visit. A kind doctor sends him, hoping he can offer ‘some tenderness’ (258). Humbled, the kneeling Bond is, nonetheless, incapable of offering any comfort nor of proffering thanks, either on a personal or a professional basis. He simply falls asleep, with his ‘dark, rather cruel face’ (258) showing no emotion. Domino is left ‘in great pain’ (258) caused by her brother’s disregard of her welfare, Largo’s sexual exploitation, and Bond’s use of her as a hero by proxy—all patriarchal attitudes. Domino can be a hero because her liberated sexuality connects her with Bond in a peculiar anti-patriarchal twist that reveals the ambiguity of Fleming’s misogyny. Habitually, Bennett and Woollacott argue, ‘the threat of ideological disruption embodied in both the villain’s conspiracy and “the girl’s out-of-placeness” is avoided because Bond— as delegated representative of M, the holding centre of England and the

116  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld patriarchal order—proves “man enough” for the task’ (140). This is not the case at all in Thunderball. Without Domino’s resistance to torture, her bold escape, and daring rescue of Bond, he could not be validated as a hero, or as a (heterosexual) man. Christine Bold seems, then, right to argue that ‘the agency lost by women at the level of manifest narrative commentary is recovered by a strategy which positions women centrally within the formation of national identity’ (212). Domino, though Italian, props up British masculinity by saving Bond but the heroic plot never truly belongs to her. Nor does it harm the main villain, Blofeld, who remains at large.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: A Choice of Villainous Patriarchs Largo’s downfall is just a temporary hindrance for Blofeld and a chance to renew energies for the next episode in his confrontation with Bond. The events in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are set in 1962, one year after Thunderball. Fleming never mentions Domino even though her actions are instrumental in bringing SPECTRE down and forcing Blofeld to escape. The villain reappears with increased protagonism as the owner of Piz Gloria, in the Swiss Alps. This resort combines skiing facilities for what used to be called the jet-set with a clinic specializing in the treatment of allergies; this acts as a cover for Blofeld’s secret laboratory to wage biological warfare on Britain. Frayling’s critique of the hypocrisy behind the villains’ characterization in the Bond series applies to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The imperative dismantling of their labs and weaponry prevents, he protests, any nuanced discussion of why these armaments are developed at all by legitimate scientists. ‘Weapons of mass destruction’, he bitterly notes, ‘are okay with us, but not with them’ (41). While the terrorist plot of Thunderball contains some grains of ­credibility, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service tells, being lenient, a less convincing story. This novel is, nevertheless, a significant addition to the Bond series. It narrates not only the second stage of Bond’s clash with Blofeld but also how Bond meets and marries Comtesse Teresa di Vicenzo, or Tracy as she prefers, a minor but essential character. Her murder by Blofeld and his henchwoman Irma—only hours after the wedding—transforms their feud with Bond into a personal vendetta. Tracy also causes Bond to establish a controversial tie with her father, Marc-Ange Draco, the head of the Union Corse, one of the criminal organizations formerly affiliated with SPECTRE. The peculiar name Draco indicates that Marc-Ange is the type of villain that Bond should be targeting for termination. In this patriarchal tale, though, the princess is the dragon’s only daughter and she, not the beast, is tragically slayed.

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  117 Draco helps Bond to hunt down Blofeld (as his wedding present) because even though Marc-Ange grants that he is himself ‘a great criminal’, Blofeld, he claims, is ‘too bad, too disgusting’ (OHMSS 222). There are, then, two types of patriarchal villainy in this novel: Blofeld’s variant is utterly abhorred whereas Draco’s no less patriarchal villainy is condoned through Bond’s marriage to Tracy. When Bond first meets Draco, he shows ‘respect’ because this man is ‘one of the great professionals of the world!’ (41, original exclamation mark). Their subsequent friendship seems incompatible with Bond’s status as MI6 employee, particularly because by choosing Draco as his father-in-law Bond appears to be rejecting M as a paternal surrogate for his own dead father. Draco is ‘the big Other, the confessor’ whom Bond uses when he goes beyond ‘the Law-of-the-father, or rather, M’s wishes and admonitions’ (Mills 117), though this is not a choice which M opposes—quite the opposite. That Bond may become part of Draco’s family with M’s full approval is disquieting, for Marc-Ange is most categorically a villain. Since Bond is not a hero on a quest but merely part of MI6’s staff, he stops chasing Blofeld and even submits a letter of resignation, which M rejects. His interest is rekindled only when he meets Draco, in connection with his daughter. Bond and Tracy are gamblers in the same casino of the fictional French town of Royale-les-Eaux where Fleming set Casino Royale. The fairly melodramatic patriarchal plot has Bond rescue Tracy from the humiliation of bankruptcy and of being subsequently ostracized by her snobbish social circle, a service for which she rewards him with an intense night of sex, no strings attached. Playgirl Tracy conceals an inconvenient background: her exquisite education has aroused in her a deep revulsion for her father’s profession. She hides her shame behind a reckless existence, led in the style of her late wild English mother. Marc-Ange constantly spies on his unruly daughter, suspecting that she might not be able to survive the recent loss of a baby daughter to meningitis right after being abandoned by her aristocratic husband. Draco interprets Bond’s rescue at the casino table and his preventing Tracy’s ensuing attempted suicide as acts of chivalry, subsequently offering Bond a fortune if he marries his daughter. Bond rejects the deal not because he disputes Draco’s right to sell Tracy but because he will only court her if she first recovers from depression. His condition sends Tracy, conveniently for the plot, to a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland, the country where Blofeld, as a grateful Draco informs Bond, is hiding. Bond’s plan to catch ‘the biggest crook in the world’ (OHMSS 63) consists of approaching the man and kidnap him ‘rather like the Israelis did with Eichmann’ (8). As cover, he assumes the identity of Sir Hilary Bray, an envoy sent by the English College of Arms to verify Blofeld’s claim to the aristocratic title he is already using (Count of Bleuville, as noted). To cancel out the readers’ many difficulties to suspend disbelief, Fleming has M receive Bond’s plan as ‘a pack of nonsense’ (70).

118  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld An expert from the College bearing the singular professional nickname of Sable Basilisk informs Bond that Blofeld’s Achilles heel appears to be his snobbery. ‘This man’, Basilisk explains. ‘knows he is unclean, a social pariah. Which of course he is’ (69). His new identity is supposed to satisfy a ‘craving for respectability’ (69), a view which is only partly correct. Posing as Bray, Bond invites himself to Piz Gloria to check specifically whether Blofeld possesses a physical trait common among the real Bleuvilles. In his first meeting with the villain, Bond quickly realizes that Blofeld is simply trying to conceal the less savoury aspects of his family background with his fallacious claim to the title, which he tries to purchase anyway by bribing ‘Bray’. For reasons only Fleming could explain, Blofeld has acquired a very different physical appearance in his new incarnation as the ‘Count’. He is, logically, still tall and has the same long, thin hands and feet but his other bodily features are altered. The once black hair is now ‘silvery white’ (106), the ears have a different shape, the body is much thinner. Most strikingly, his nose is not ‘squat’ but ‘aquiline’ with the right nostril ‘eaten away, poor chap, by what looked like the badge of tertiary syphilis’ (106). How the supposedly asexual Blofeld has been disfigured in just one year is never clarified, nor why a man whose newly minted countenance is the result of ‘the most refined facial and stomach surgery’ (109) has not corrected this blemish. The bizarre looks are completed with thick green-tinted lenses to protect his delicate eyes, Bond assumes, from the snow’s glare. Thunderball mentions that Blofeld has already blackmailed MI6 by threatening to unleash biological warfare. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he plans to send back home a group of young British girls after treating them for their allergies at Piz Gloria. Bond discovers that the ten girls are conditioned under deep hypnosis to propagate in each of the rural areas where they live the viruses hidden in their anti-allergy nebulizers. The cattle and crops all over the United Kingdom will be, thus, infected and the country starved. A Ministry of Agriculture representative eventually explains to Bond and M that the plan could have worked because Britain is ‘the most highly agriculturalized country in the world. We had to make ourselves so during the war to keep ourselves from starvation’ (203). This makes the UK vulnerable to the new kind of biological warfare that the United States fears.9 Britain, a much smaller nation than America, can be devastated even by a midrange attack of the kind Blofeld is planning. Blofeld’s attempt ‘to render all plant and animal life infertile’ may be ‘arguably the most terroristic plot in the Bond canon’ (Mills 118) but Fleming replaces potential national catastrophe with melodramatic romance. Unmasked accidentally, Bond flees Piz Gloria and is rescued by Tracy, sent by her anxious father to check on him. Finding her cured of depression as he requested, Bond proposes marriage to her. He chooses

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  119 beautiful, ‘adventurous, brave, resourceful’ (OHMSS 183) Tracy because of her personal qualities but also because, in his profoundly sexist vision of marriage, Bond believes that ‘She’d let me go on with my life’ (183). With Draco’s help, Bond storms Piz Gloria, manned by the leftovers from Blofeld’s former SPECTRE staff but, though the facilities are destroyed, the villain manages to escape. Bond and Tracy celebrate their wedding with M, the best man, making no comment on Draco’s status as the Capu, or head, of a criminal organization. Marc-Ange is presented as a caring father, willing to subsidize Tracy’s married life to maintain her classy lifestyle—an offer which proud Bond rejects—and as a respectable hero. His outfit includes ‘two rows of medals of which the last, to Bond’s astonishment, was the Fling’s Medal for foreign ­resistance-fighters’ (255) during WWII. A bit sheepishly, Draco grants that ‘Medals are so often just the badges of good luck’ but still boasts that ‘If I am a hero, it is for things for which no medals are awarded’ (255). The bonding between the villainous father-in-law and the orphaned MI6 hero agent is soon wrecked. Blofeld’s main collaborator and admirer, Irma Bunt (here not yet his lover), spots the newlyweds in Munich, which sets revenge in motion. The honeymoon couple is chased on the autobahn and although Blofeld intends to eliminate both, Irma’s bullets only murder Tracy. ‘One might comment’, Santos notes ‘on the irony of the lesbian-coded Bunt assassinating the wife, and presumably potential last lover of the hyper-masculine figure of James Bond, but the more important issue is the pathos involved in this last segment’ (108). Mrs. Bond’s tragic, sad fate is ultimately conditioned by the patriarchal alliance between her criminal father and her supposedly heroic husband and sealed by the triangular confrontation between her two dubious champions and the arch-villain Blofeld. Tracy is reduced to being just the excuse for a bizarre final showdown, which Bond survives with only moderate trauma. Draco is never mentioned again. The failure ‘to gain recognition from a recalcitrant world’ plunges Blofeld into downright madness and Bond ‘responds with more Humiliation’, thus ‘compounding the psychic damage and perpetuating the cycle of violence’ (Held 151, original upper case), which You Only Live Twice continues.

You Only Live Twice: ‘An Eccentric of the Most Devilish Nature’ You Only Live Twice is set in 1963, nine months after Tracy’s murder. Fleming never alludes to the previous events in The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), a novel in which Bond unsuccessfully chases Blofeld across American territory. The first part of You Only Live Twice centres mostly on whether Bond can function again professionally as an MI6 agent and sexually as a man, in view of the after-effects of Tracy’s death. These personal matters run parallel to the national/political issue of whether

120  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld Britain is entitled to playing a major role in the world-wide chase of villainy. Blofeld resurfaces only in the second part of YOLT as the focus of a revenge plot, improvised rather than planned, which Fleming uses to connect the twin problems of the heroic functionality of both Bond and Britain. ‘I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings’ (n.p. online), Fleming declared in ‘How to Write a Thriller’. His choice of Japan as a location for YOLT followed from a Sunday Times commission in 1962 to write the article series ‘Thrilling Cities’, later published as a book. Fleming offered his readers ‘an idiosyncratic portrait’ of a variety of cities but ‘also a mirror into British cultural anxieties of this era’; besides, he ‘mined these nonfiction travelogues’ for his novels (Dresner 627). Some real-life characters Fleming met when writing the Tokyo article were fictionalized in YOLT. He also transferred to Bond ‘the Westerner Fleming’s struggles to conform to the expectations of an Eastern society’ (Dresner 629). The MI6 agent became ‘the ultimate Orientalist’ (Baron 154) but, most importantly, a key witness of a major British defeat. Japan was the hotspot where the CIA’s bid for the leadership of Western intelligence was consolidated, and Bond is sent there by MI6 to undermine it, with poor results. This has direct consequences in Blofeld’s narrative arc. When Bond discovers that Doctor Shatterhand, the criminal whom his Japanese colleagues ask him to chase in exchange for their help, is Blofeld’s new identity, he keeps the information to himself. Understanding that MI6 is powerless in this new CIA-dominated context and that the Japanese will only obey their American masters, Bond abandons his mission to focus his efforts on avenging Tracy. ‘In this adventure, Blofeld is involved in a totally improbable situation and scheme—a phrase that really has weight in a book about Bond’ (Black Politics 62). YOLT initially follows narrative parameters which might be called realistic, stretching this concept quite a bit, but the second part is, plainly, the stuff of blatant pulp fiction. Bond’s efficiency as an MI6 agent is severely hampered by his neurotic sense of guilt in relation to Tracy’s murder. To heal Bond, M sends him on an impossible errand, trusting that patriotism will reawaken his lost zeal. M invents for Bond a mission consisting of establishing an outpost in Japan, which MI6 abandoned in 1950, behind the CIA’s back. Bond asks his Australian colleague Bill Tanner how the CIA will react to this pert intrusion, but he is reassured that Japan is not an American possession and, anyway, the CIA has no clean record, either. In patriarchal terms, what is at stake is who has the credentials to play hero. Ultimately, American world-wide power and influence gain the upper hand over British territorial claims. Tiger Tanaka, Head of the Japanese Secret Service, helps Bond despite the obeisance he owes the CIA, resisting in this way his subordination

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  121 to the power that occupied Japan between 1945 and 1952. He plays, nonetheless, with Bond’s national insecurities by teasing him about the feeble justifications maintaining British interests in Eastern Asia. Bond, irritated, insists that Captain Cook’s discovery of Australia and New Zealand makes British involvement in the area ‘perfectly legitimate’ (47). Later, once their alliance is firm, Tanaka still badgers Bond about the British claims to power. Many in Japan have lost their good opinion of Britain not only because its Empire has vanished but mostly because ‘you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands’ (79). Tanaka qualifies the Suez crisis of 1956 as an unmitigated disaster, criticizing besides the British Government’s inability to limit the influence of the trade unions. British ‘moral fibre’ (80), once respected world-wide, is being squandered by the new ‘vacuous, aimless horde of seekers-after-pleasure’ (80). Why, Tanaka wonders, should he sympathize with ‘the pitiful ruins of a once great Power’ (80, original upper case)? Aggrieved, Bond launches a heart-felt defence of his fellow Britons, even though he knows that Tanaka’s onslaught is based on bitter ‘half-truths’ (81). This bitterness extends to the realization, based on evidence which Tanaka provides, that Khrushchev’s Soviet Union might easily nuke ­Britain into oblivion. A message which the Japanese have intercepted suggests that Russian bombs might be used to break the USA-UK alliance. The Politburo has got hold of secret American documents evidencing that the USA will not enter a nuclear war to protect a disempowered ally, comparable, these documents note, only to nations such as Italy or even Belgium. In Fleming’s version of the 1963 October missile crisis, President Kennedy must publicly announce, under pressure from the UK, that the United States will retaliate against the Soviet Union no matter where an eventual nuclear attack may happen. The threat, nonetheless, is not completely dispelled. You Only Live Twice becomes a quite different novel once Blofeld reappears, transformed into a Gothic villain. Tanaka asks Bond to return the favour done to Britain and eliminate the man he knows as Dr. Shatterhand, a monstrous ‘eccentric of the most devilish nature’ (61). According to Tanaka, Shatterhand gained residence in Japan by buying the authorities’ goodwill with an offer to set up expensive research facilities to investigate sub-tropical flora. For this, he has planted an extensive garden in a newly restored castle on the island of Kyushu, famous for its geysers and fumaroles. Together with his wife (Irma Bunt) and the staff recruited from the Black Dragon Society, Dr. Shatterhand runs a private kingdom outside the control of the Japanese authorities. The sinister garden, a ‘Disneyland of death’ (171) as Irma calls it, full of toxic plants and poisonous fauna—even boasting a piranha-infested lake— has already attracted five hundred suicidal individuals. Tanaka hopes that gaijin Bond will neutralize this other gaijin but, above all, the Prime

122  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld Minister and Tanaka consider Bond’s mission a test to regain British credibility—he is to play St. George and face the ‘foolish dragon’ (129). Bond reacts with some scepticism to Tanaka’s description of this ‘death collector’ (the title of Chapter 7), reading the surreal situation as a product of Tiger’s fixation with Shatterhand; still, Bond admits that ‘subtle, authentic glimpses of Japan’ could be found in ‘the ridiculous, nightmare story with its undertones of Poe, Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce’ (77). Lafcadio Hearn, de Sade, and Lautréamont are later mentioned, possibly as Fleming’s underhand strategy to undermine his readers’ reluctance to suspending their disbelief. He fails, anyway, because unlike these illustrious practitioners of Gothic fiction, Fleming cannot give his villain enough credibility. When Tanaka remarks that Shatterhand can walk freely in his noxious garden because he always wears 17th-century ‘full suits of armour’, Bond replies ‘What a daft set-up’ (67). His words sum up You Only Live Twice quite well. A most preposterous, racist aspect of the daft set-up is Bond’s transformation into a fake Japanese fisherman and his training as a ninja warrior. Bond is, besides, welcome by the inhabitants of Ama Island, who are to help him, as the embodiment of a local legend. Islander Kissy Suzuki, his love interest, explains to Bond that her people see the new resident of the fortress as the very embodiment of Western evil. According to the legend, Ama’s Jizo Guardians—Buddhist demi-gods that protect children—will send a hero to eliminate this ‘King of Death’ (148), though Kissy is mystified that the chosen saviour should be a gaijin. Oddly, once the amnesia caused by wounds received during his final confrontation with Blofeld sets in, Bond seems convinced that he is indeed Japanese fisherman Taro Todoroki, despite his Western looks and inability to speak Japanese. When he regains his memory in a later novel, Bond has forgotten for good this other identity and his rather happy romance with Kissy; he ignores, too, that they have a son because Kissy conceals his pregnancy.10 Fleming’s cavalier attitude to characterization leads also to new alterations in Blofeld’s physical appearance. Here, he sports a ‘drooping black moustache. He had had the syphilitic nose repaired. There was a gold-capped tooth among the upper frontals’ (124). In this last act of the Blofeld trilogy, the villain is, plainly, a madman. The Japanese press starts reporting news about the hundreds of suspicious deaths in his garden, and Blofeld rushes to blackmail the Government. He intends to move next to another country and repeat his crazy scam, convinced that, despite possible warnings by the Japanese, he will still succeed. With his sanity Blofeld has seemingly also lost his villainous business acumen. At least, he is happy and enjoys the full support of his wife. Bond notes that they make a ‘homely couple’ (181), he in his black silk kimono adorned with a golden dragon and she in ‘the full regalia of a high-class Japanese lady’ (181). He also notices that these two content human monsters use all kinds of endearments with each other.

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  123 The high camp of Blofeld and Irma’s new characterization extends to the final showdown with Bond. Blofeld forces his rival to drop his ninja disguise by placing him on top of a geyser about to erupt and, half-­ impressed by the act, Bond quips that ‘we’ll get Noel Coward to put it to music and have it on Broadway by Christmas’ (188). Madness is not to be understood as actual mental illness but as the classic cliché in the overblown characterization of the villains in melodrama. Bond tells the couple they are ‘mad as hatters’ and Blofeld coolly replies, comparing himself to Frederick the Great, Nietzsche, and Van Gogh that he and Irma are ‘in illustrious company’ (192). Neither is speaking about insanity that can be healed by current psychiatry but of the farcical deviance from the norm of cardboard fictional villains. According to Landa, ‘the fight against Blofeld’s “evil Nietzscheanism” is undertaken under the latent premises of “good Nietzscheanism”’ (93), but this is raising charitably the level of the confrontation to heights it never has. Mad villains always feel an inexplicable urge to justify themselves instead of killing their vanquished foe without delay. In You Only Live Twice, the corresponding scene is introduced with a metafictional comment (focalized through Bond) about this urge, which offers the conclusion that ‘it was pleasant, reassuring to the executioner, to deliver his apologia—purge the sin he was about to commit’ (193, my italics). In Blofeld’s version of their feud, he is a genius constantly hindered by an irritating, minor obstacle. The two projects which Bond had previously demolished were not, Blofeld claims, ‘crimes against humanity’ but ‘public service unique in the history of the world’ (194). In a voice that sounds ‘reasonable, self-assured, quietly expository’ (194), Blofeld explains that his terrorist threat to drop two stolen atomic bombs should be read as a warning: others, like Castro, he says, might arbitrarily exterminate humankind. His intended bacteriological onslaught against Britain was another warning, which aimed at shaking ‘sick’ Britain ‘out of her lethargy into the kind of community effort we witnessed during the war’ (194). Since his third pet project is less grand, Blofeld acknowledges ‘a certain lassitude of mind which I am determined to combat’ (194). He attributes his apathy to his lonely status as a wronged genius and to growing disaffection with humankind, which, he observes, typically appears in middle age. Male menopause, so to speak, inspires the villain to develop a taste for stronger thrills. He sees his deathly garden, nevertheless, as an ‘essentially humane project’ (194) that even helps the Japanese Government to protect the public from the traumatic sight of violent self-murder. Bond reacts to Blofeld’s self-validation with extreme violence. Tanaka had requested that Irma be also eliminated because of her criminal involvement but also because ‘anyway she is too ugly to live’ (123), and Bond complies with a vicious blow to her head before strangling Blofeld. The habitually self-controlled agent is ultimately dominated by ‘the terrible grip of blood lust’ (197) connected with revenge,

124  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld rather than with any need to do justice. After slaying the dragon and blowing up his lair, receiving in the process the head wound that destroys his memory, Bond is rescued by Kissy Suzuki; she, with the complicity of the community elders, convinces him that he is her lover Taro. Tiger Tanaka’s inability to find the missing Bond is not discussed, whereas MI6 simply assumes that Bond died in the castle. M writes in Bond’s obituary that ‘through the recent valorous efforts of this one man, the Safety of the Realm has received mighty reassurance’ (202), even though the villain’s execution has no direct connection with Britain, at least in this third novel. There is, of course, no obituary for Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

The Spy Who Loved Me: A Different Species The last novel Fleming wrote, possibly his weakest, The Man with the Golden Gun (published posthumously in 1965), offers a certain sense of closure. Bond rejects the knighthood which Queen Elizabeth II proposes on behalf of the Prime Minister and of MI6 for eliminating villain Paco Scaramanga. He is pleased but refuses to become a ‘public figure’, much less ‘in the snobbish world of England, or of any country’ (MGG 209). Bond tells his girlfriend at the time, Mary Goodnight, who very much wants him to accept the honour, that ‘I just refuse to call myself Sir James Bond. I’d laugh at myself every time I looked in the mirror to shave’ (212). This might be, however, not at all true anti-establishment defiance but just nervous laughter elicited by Bond’s own doubts about whether he truly deserves any heroic distinction. The end of the least valued of the original Bond novels, The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), provides even better closure to the whole series in a passage frequently cited as evidence that Fleming saw his hero as an anti-hero, if not as a downright villain. Black reports that this novel ‘received the worst reception of all Bond books’, though the story ‘was much the most ambitious of the series’ (Politics 72). The first-person narrator is a young Canadian woman, Vivienne (or Viv) Michell. She is the accidental caretaker of a motel in the Adirondacks Mountains owned by a Mr.  ­Sanguinetti, which two gangsters in his payroll, Sol ‘Horror’ Horowitz and ‘Sluggsy’ Morant, intend to burn down as part of their boss’s insurance fraud scheme. The gangsters prepare to rape and kill Viv before committing arson when Bond—driving from Toronto to Washington, chasing Blofeld—stops at the motel to repair his car. He rescues Viv and, predictably, she rewards him for the deed with a night of wild sex. Her candid first-person narrative reveals that Bond is a brutish lover, despite which Viv is immediately infatuated: ‘Apart from the excitement of his looks, his authority, his maleness, he had come from nowhere, like the prince in the fairy tales, and he had saved me from the dragon’ (SWLM 188). Captain Stonor, the compliant police officer that Bond

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  125 himself calls in to retrieve the bodies of the murdered gangsters and conceal his own presence, warns Viv once Bond leaves that although he understands her romantic feelings for her rescuer, Bond is no knight but a man quite similar to her attackers. Gangsters, secret agents, and spies ‘are cold-hearted, coldblooded, ruthless, tough killers’ for they ‘wouldn’t survive if they weren’t’ (SWLM 209). Stonor advises Viv to avoid that kind of men, ‘whether they’re called James Bond or Sluggsy Morant’ because ‘They’re just different people from the likes of you—a different species’ (SWLM 209). Villains can never be trusted but, as Fleming warns through Bond, nor can heroes for both are, in fact, our Others.

Notes 1 See the list of all Bond films here: www.007james.com/articles/list_of_ james_bond_movies.php. 2 The other Bond authors are Kingsley Amis (as Robert Markham), John Pearson, Christopher Wood, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver, William Boyd, and Anthony Horowitz. There is also a young adult series by Charlie Higson and Stevie Cole. 3 The British charity Changing Faces launched in November 2018 the campaign ‘I Am Not Your Villain’ aimed at persuading the national film industry to stop linking villainy to facial scars. This connection is most common in ‘the baddies of the Bond films, where five of 007’s major adversaries—Ernst Blofeld, Renard, Emilio Largo, Le Chiffre and Raoul Silva—as well as numerous henchmen—are notably scarred or disfigured’ (Woodhead n.p. online). The British Film Institute supports the campaign (see Pulver), which will necessarily affect the Bond films, a British franchise. Incidentally, Fleming’s Bond has a thin scar which crosses vertically his right cheek, a feature intended to connect him with the villains and never shown in the films for that reason. 4 After years of constant denials, MI6 admitted in two reports issued in June 2018 its participation in the kidnapping and torture of 9/11 suspects between 2001 and 2010. ‘While there was no evidence of officers directly carrying out physical mistreatment of detainees’, Cobain and MacAskills clarify, ‘the reports say the overseas agency MI6 and the domestic service MI5 were involved in hundreds of torture cases and scores of rendition cases’ (n.p. online). 5 Thunderball was the title which Fleming chose for a screenplay by Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham, initially called SPECTRE, James Bond of the Secret Service (a.k.a. Longitude 78 West). Fleming novelized this screenplay, allegedly with Ivar Bryce, without the authors’ permission. McClory sued Fleming who, having suffered a heart attack, settled out of court. Fleming kept the rights, Macek reports, but all subsequent editions of the novel ‘had to be credited as “based on a script treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and Ian Fleming” (in that order). Fleming ultimately admitted that the novel contained many of McClory’s and Whittingham’s ideas, including the storyline itself’ (n.p. online). McClory kept fighting for his rights over Thunderball until his death in 2006. 6 Or just a spectral enemy. A Playboy article celebrating the forty-yearlong association between Bond and the magazine—which introduced him to America—claims that ‘The clothes, the cars, the food, the gadgets, the

126  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld girls, the wit, the sensual pleasure—these things matter. The enemy was not Spectre but ennui, conformity, the daily grind’ (168). Claire Hines agrees that Playboy, founded in 1953, and James Bond ‘reinforced the same consumerist playboy lifestyle, rooted in an informed appreciation of the pleasures of a range of consumer goods and entertainments, especially women’ (2). 7 Blofeld also has different onscreen identities, having been played by diverse actors: Anthony Dawson (Thunderball, 1965, uncredited), Donald Pleasence (You Only Live Twice, 1967), Telly Savalas (On His Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969), Charles Gray (Diamonds Are Forever, 1971), John Hollis (For Your Eyes Only, 1981, uncredited), Max von Sydow (Never Say Never Again, 1983), and Christoph Waltz (Spectre, 2015). Pleasence’s iconic Blofeld—a bald man, with heavy facial scarring crossing his right eye, dressed in a Mao suit, and carrying his pet white cat in his arms—inspired Mike Myers’s Dr. Evil in the three Austin Powers films (1997–2002). 8 As played by Italian actor Adolfo Celi in the film Thunderball (1965), Largo is also in his forties but a less handsome, youthful man. His left eye is missing for reasons never explained; presumably, the black eye-patch characterizes him as a piratical character. 9 The Ministry delegate cites as his source an actual US Senate paper of 29 August 1960 by the Subcommittee on Disarmament of the Committee on Foreign Relations, titled ‘Chemical-biological-radiological (CBR) Warfare and its Disarmament Aspects’. 10 James Suzuki Bond appears in Raymond Benson’s short story ‘Blast from the Past’ (1997), in which Bond is presented as a dutiful but distant father. Young James, also a secret agent, is murdered by Irma Bunt, who in this version has survived Bond’s assault at the end of You Only Live Twice.

Works Cited Adams, Alex. ‘“The Sweet Tang of Rape”: Torture, Survival and Masculinity in Ian Fleming’s Bond Novels’. Feminist Theory 18.2 (2017): 137–158. Amis, Kingsley. The James Bond Dossier. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. Banner, Deborah. ‘Why Don’t They Just Shoot Him? The Bond Villains and Cold War Heroism’. The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, Stacy Gillis & Philippa Gates (eds.). Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. 121–134. Baron, Cynthia. ‘Doctor No: Bonding Britishness to Racial Sovereignty’. The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, Christoph Lindner (ed.). Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014. 153–168. Bennett, Tony. ‘The Bond Phenomenon: Theorising a Popular Hero—A Retrospective’. International Journal of James Bond Studies 1.1 (2017): 1–34. https://jamesbondstudies.roehampton.ac.uk/articles/abstract/10.24877/jbs.4/ ——— & Janet Woollacott. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. New York: Methuen, 1987. Black, Jeremy. The World of James Bond: The Life and Times of 007. Lanham, etc.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. ———. The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005. Bold, Christine. ‘“Under the Very Skirts of Britannia”: Re-reading Women in the James Bond Novels’. The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, Christoph Lindner (ed.). Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014. 205–219.

Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld  127 Changing Faces (Press Office). ‘“I Am not Your Villain” Campaign Launches Today in The Telegraph’. Changing Faces 16 November 2018. www.changing faces.org.uk/i-am-not-your-villain-campaign-launches-today-in-the-telegraph Cobain, Ian & Ewen MacAskill. ‘True Scale of UK Role in Torture and Rendition after 9/11 Revealed’. The Guardian 28 June 2018. www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2018/jun/28/uk-role-torture-kidnap-terror-suspects-after-911revealed Comentale, Edward P. ‘Fleming’s Company Man: James Bond and the Management of Modernism’. Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt & Skip Willman (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. 3–21. Dresner, Lisa. ‘“Barbary Apes Wrecking a Boudoir”: Reaffirmations of and Challenges to Western Masculinity in Ian Fleming’s Japan Narratives’. Journal of Popular Culture 49.3 (2016): 627–645. Eco, Umberto. ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’ (1965). R.A. Downie (trans.) (1966). The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, Christoph Lindner (ed.). Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. 34–55. Fleming, Ian. The Man with the Golden Gun (1965). London: Vintage, 2012. ———. You Only Live Twice (1964). Harmondsworth: Penguin 2004. ———. ‘How to Write a Thriller’. Books and Bookmen 8.8 (May 1963): 14–19. www.jefferyrussell.net/blog/may-23rd-2016 ———. On her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963). Harmondsworth: Penguin 2004. ———. The Spy Who Loved Me (1962). London: Vintage, 2012. ———. Thunderball (1961). Harmondsworth: Penguin 2004. ———. Dr. No (1958). London: Penguin, 2002. ———. From Russia with Love (1957). London: Vintage, 2012. ———. Moonraker (1955). London: Vintage, 2012. ———. Live and Let Die (1954). London: Vintage, 2012. ———. Casino Royale (1953). London: Penguin, 2002. Frayling, Christopher. Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. Funnell, Lisa & Klaus Dodds. ‘The Haptic Geographies of James Bond’s Body’. Geographies, Genders, and Geopolitics of James Bond. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 21–44. Held, Jacob M. ‘“Don’t You Men Know Any Other Way?”: Punishment Beyond Retributivism and Deterrence’. James Bond and Philosophy: Questions are Forever, Jacob M. Held & James B. South (eds.). Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2006. 139–154. Hines, Claire. The Playboy and James Bond: 007, Ian Fleming and Playboy Magazine. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2018. Kinane, Ian. ‘James Bond Studies: Evolutions of a Critical Field’. International Journal of James Bond Studies 1.1 (2017): 1–11. https://jamesbondstudies. roehampton.ac.uk/articles/abstract/10.24877/jbs.3/ Landa, Ishay. ‘James Bond: A Nietzschean for the Cold War’. James Bond and Philosophy: Questions are Forever, Jacob M. Held & James B. South (eds.). Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2006. 79–93. Macek III, J.C. ‘The Non-Bonds: James Bond’s Bitter, Decades-Long Battle… with James Bond’. Pop Matters 4 October 2012. www.popmatters.com/16

128  Larger than Life: Ernst Stavro Blofeld 3228-the-non-bonds-james-bonds-bitter-decades-long-battle-with-jamesbond-2495815610.html Matheson, Sue. ‘He Who Eats Meat Wins: Appetite, Power and Nietzsche in the Novels of Ian Fleming’. James Bond and Philosophy: Questions are Forever, Jacob M. Held & James B. South (eds.). Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2006. 63–78. Mills, Dan. ‘“What Really Went on up There James?”: Bond’s Wife, Blofeld’s Patients, and Empowered Bond Women’. For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond, Lisa Funnell (ed.). New York and London: Wallflower Press, 2015. 110–118. Price, Thomas J. ‘The Changing Image of the Soviets in the Bond Saga: From Bond-Villains to “Acceptable Role Partners”’. Journal of Popular Culture 26.1 (Summer 1992): 17–37. Pulver, Andrew. ‘BFI to Refuse Funding for Films with Facially-Scarred Villains’. The Guardian 29 November 2018. www.theguardian.com/film/ 2018/nov/29/bfi-to-refuse-funding-for-films-with-facially-scarred-villains Rubio, Steven. ‘If I Were a Villain, but then Again, No’. James Bond in the 21st Century: Why We Still Need 007, Glenn Yeffeth & Leah Wilson (eds.). Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2006. 93–100. Santos, Marlisa. ‘“This Never Happened to the Other Fellow”: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as Bond Woman’s Film’. For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond, Lisa Funnell (ed.). New York & London: Wallflower Press, 2015. 101–109. Spence, Richard B. ‘Aleister Crowley, Sidney Reilly, Basil Zaharoff: Their Influence on the Creation of James Bond and his World’. James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films are Not Enough, Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield & Jack Becker (eds.). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 216–227. ‘The Bond Files’ (unsigned). Playboy 47.6 (June 2000): 84, 168. Watt, Stephen. ‘007 and 9/11, Specters and Structures of Feeling’. Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt & Skip Willman (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. 238–260. Whelehan, Imelda. ‘Breaking Bond’s Balls: A Feminist Re-Reading Ian Fleming 107’. James Bond Uncovered, Jeremy Strong (ed.). Cham: Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2018. 107–126. Winder, Simon. The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Woodhead, Hannah. ‘Why Facial Scarring Persists as Lazy Shorthand for Hollywood Bad Guys’. The Guardian 12 June 2018. www.theguardian.com/ film/2018/jun/12/facial-scarring-movie-villainy-solo-star-wars-avengers-bond Woodward, Steven. ‘The Arch Archenemies of James Bond’. Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen, Murray Pomerance (ed.). Albany: State U of New York P, 2004. 173–185. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Reflections on 11 September 2001)’. The Universal Exception. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. 267–288.

6 Richard Onslow Roper and the ‘Labyrinth of Monstrosities’ John le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains The Villain in Transition: Capitalism and the Dead Damsel in Distress The trilogy dealing with the central segment in the career of British intelligence officer George Smiley is John le Carré’s1 most admired work. The novels Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley’s People (1979) are essential to understand the elevation of spy fiction to a higher level of literary appreciation after Ian Fleming’s Bond series. ‘I owe a great deal to Fleming for one reason only’, le Carré has ironized, he ‘produced by writing that type of romanticized, heroic, amoral novel (…) what you might call a countermarket which I was able to satisfy’ (in Bianculli n.p. online). Much of this satisfaction is provided by le Carré’s singularly oblique plotting style. Whereas Fleming is a rather shallow author, le Carré is ‘the absolute master at showing that surfaces are misleading—that there is another surface below, and another below that’ (Manning Cold War 6). I have analysed elsewhere (see Martín ‘Silent Villain’) how the Cold War confrontation between the two blocs in the Karla trilogy is shaped by patriarchal power games centred on controlling women’s sexuality. Le Carré characterizes Smiley and his Russian Communist foe as romantic heroes devoted to their chosen cause but also as failed men in the private sphere. Smiley’s main limitation is an inability to secure his wife Ann’s fidelity, for he is a loving but emotionally inexpressive husband. Karla’s2 promiscuous teen daughter Tatiana rebels, eventually losing her sanity, after learning that she is an adopted child and that the man who controls her from afar is not only her biological father but also her mother’s murderer. Karla had his common-law East German wife executed for disloyalty to the Communist regime though, actually, he murders her to end their quarrels about how much freedom their child should be given. Karla cannot eliminate a daughter he loves, possibly against his own inclinations, nor can Smiley abandon Ann and, so, each exploits the other’s sentimental weaknesses. Karla, as A Legacy of Spies (2017) discloses, is so devastated by Smiley’s final victory over him that he eventually commits suicide. The Cold War context appears to be accessory

130  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains rather than fundamental in a patriarchal confrontation which could have run along very similar lines against different backgrounds. The Bond series exposes the hero’s similarities with the villain, as I have argued, but Fleming always identifies Bond positively with Britishness and his enemies negatively with a foreign threat against the nation. Karla also embodies this notion of the villain as treacherous antiBritish foreigner. Once the Cold War was over with the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, le Carré had to find other villains. The Secret Pilgrim (1990)—dealing again with Smiley’s MI6 circle, nicknamed ‘The Circus’—challenged the widespread supposition that his writing career and the genre of spy fiction had reached an end. In fact, the foretold doom never materialized because genre and author ‘managed to carry on—even flourish—with asymmetric terrorist organizations replacing the Soviets as the main source of security anxiety’ (Goodwin 104). Le Carré was actually ‘delighted to see the Cold War end’, both ‘as an ordinary human being [and] as a writer’. He saw its demise as a chance ‘to address the phenomenon of who we are and what priorities we have’ and to examine ‘this leaderless period of confusion’ from the stance of a ‘disenchanted romantic’ (in Rose video). Le Carré’s romanticism finds expression in the sentimental, sincere patriotism with a profound anti-upper-class bias which articulates his post-Cold War novels. British society is disintegrating, and ‘The source of this rottenness lies, for le Carré, in the decadence of its ruling class’ (Monaghan 571). In his pessimistic view, ‘The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, the poorer have become hopeless because they’re not properly cared for’ (le Carré in Plimpton 61). After The Secret Pilgrim and since The Night Manager (1993), le Carré has concentrated on the issue of how and why supposedly honourable upper-class Englishmen engage in intensive villainy. This question shapes other 1990s novels in his extensive production but le Carré’s first 21st-century work, The Constant Gardener (2001), establishes an interesting new departure about how to represent villainy. In The Night Manager the villain is, following traditional convention, a specific man. In The Constant Gardener, in contrast, villainy is presented as a diffuse network of patriarchal interests formed by ‘figures and institutions that purport to be allies’ (Goodman British Spy Fiction 12) but that only seek their own benefit. Specifically, le Carré’s fiction undermines the supposedly successful outcome of the Cold War to denounce that ‘Now that the demons of Communism have been defeated, capitalism run amok takes on the role of the enemy’ (Hindersmann 33). Capitalist voracity is the compulsion lying behind upper-class villainy. Britton contends that le Carré can be said to write ‘“anti-thrillers” because he doesn’t follow the formula of exalting the hero when the villain is conquered’ (128). This might be valid for George Smiley but not for The Night Manager and The Constant Gardener, my focus here. Le

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  131 Carré’s novels are highly topical, which is why they are often discussed with a focus on the basis of their historical issues rather than on how le Carré celebrates heroic masculinity. Despite their many differences, Fleming and le Carré defend a similar principle: the honourability of Englishness (or Britishness) is at risk and must be defended by gentlemen. Fleming grants that the gentleman is less than perfect with Bond’s flawed heroic characterization. Le Carré prefers average men to rise to the occasion as perfect gentlemen, whether they are placed inside MI6, like George Smiley, or outside, like amateur spies Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager and Justin Quayle in The Constant Gardener. His gentlemen spies have an essential decency that Bond lacks, and this is the reason why they are exalted as heroic men. Paradoxically, le Carré’s patriarchal tales of male redemption are far inferior to Fleming’s as regards the female characters. Except for Bond’s wife Tracy, the resilient Bond Girl survives the encounter with the villain to become the hero’s reward; she may even rescue Bond, like Domino in Thunderball. In contrast, at least judging by the two novels here analysed, le Carré’s men can only appreciate women’s strength once they are dead—indeed, their death is their call to become heroes. As a hero’s reward, besides, they prefer vapid, dependent princesses totally unlike Fleming’s self-sufficient girls. The murder of Sophie in The Night Manager and of Tessa in The Constant Gardener, caused by their interfering with the villains’ plans, sets the English hero in motion. Volunteer spy Jonathan Pine struggles to defeat Richard Onslow Roper, an upper-class Englishman with a long career as a major arms dealer, because he cannot overcome his sense of guilt over Sophie’s murder on this man’s orders. In The Constant ­Gardener, le Carré’s accidental hero is a minor diplomat in Kenya, Justin Quayle, shaken out of his dull complacency by the atrocious murder of his young wife Tessa, an activist on the track of illegal testing for a new wonder drug that might cure tuberculosis. Although each tale could have focused on, respectively, Sophie or Tessa as living heroes, le Carré prefers a male-centred scenario for his tales of villainy, casting the women as dead damsels in distress. Pine and Quayle win only a pyrrhic victory, which allows British and international patriarchal villainy to go on, treading on its relentless path. Pine is rewarded with the hand of the princess who replaces the dead damsel in distress, but Justin must accept his own sacrifice to a cause which might not even succeed since he supports it too late. In both cases, their actions are endorsed by the author, with no hesitation. Le Carré has admitted that in the early stages of his career he was not ‘at all good at women’, whom he characterized as ‘either angels or whores’ (in Sands audio online). The justification he offers is that following his mother’s abandonment of his violent father Ronnie3 when he was five (and his brother seven), he froze emotionally. The young boy

132  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains learned to mistrust the many short-lived stepmothers Ronnie brought home, ‘And it took me a long time as a frozen child to learn women at all’ (in Sands). Despite his awareness of the problem, le Carré has not, on the whole, improved the poor design of his female characters. Citing The Little Drummer Girl (1983) as a turning point, Wolfe defends that in le Carré’s fiction women are ‘capable, reliable, and resourceful, not merely decorative’; yet he adds that they are ‘connected to protectiveness, love and romance’ (255). This shortcoming is the reason why Sexton considers le Carré’s treatment of his fictional women ‘utterly preposterous’ (n.p. online). His women are convincing as characters, unlike what S­ alman Rushdie argued in his long feud with le Carré, but they are mainly ‘mirages, fantasies, inappropriately lascivious droolings—and this aspect of his writing has only become more pronounced the older he has got’ (Sexton). His faulty female characterization, Sexton claims, is the main reason why le Carré cannot be fully accepted as a ‘serious novelist’. In my view, le Carré does take himself seriously as a novelist entertainer in the style of Charles Dickens but, like Dickens, he is limited by the iconic Victorian figure of the English gentleman. Citing George Orwell’s critique of Dickens’s failure to be a true reformer, Manning agrees that Dickens was ‘the “anti-establishment” novelist of his day, but he never challenged the capitalist structure of whose effects he was often so critical. Nor, we can see, does le Carré, whose work ultimately is a ratification of the British social and political status quo’ (‘Fanatics’ 59). Both Dickens and le Carré believe that the most abhorrent villainy is rooted in the predatory capitalism endorsed by the upper class, but they oppose it by advocating personal gentlemanly actions instead of forcing the villains to face legal justice. In The Subjection of Women (1869), published one year before Dickens’s death, philosopher J.S. Mill—the first MP to submit to the British Parliament a petition defending women’s right to vote (in 1866)—warned that gentlemanly chivalry should be suppressed because ‘it only encouraged a few to do right in preference to wrong, by the direction it gave to the instruments of praise and admiration’ (227). For Mill, the morality of justice had to replace the morality of chivalry since only ‘penal sanctions’ have ‘power to deter from evil’ (227). The figure of the idealized English gentleman, however, ‘has survived different twentieth-century literary trends because it has proven itself to be adaptable’ (Berberich 162). The new spy fiction emerging during the late 19th century and early 20th century—with authors such as John Buchan—was a particularly welcome environment. In this genre, it was soon assumed that the British agent, unlike the foreign spy, ‘was and remained, despite his activities, quintessentially a gentleman’ (Stafford 491).4 Fleming’s Bond is his obvious modern successor but so are le Carré’s heroes. Even though legal justice constitutes the main system of defence against villainy, as Mill stressed, the gentleman amateur spy

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  133 still survives in le Carré’s fiction because author and audience share a fundamental distrust of the law as an instrument controlled by the upper classes. The problem is that by sanctioning his heroes’ gentlemanly behaviour rather than demand the application of legal justice le Carré’s Dickensian anti-establishment fiction also sanctions the impression that villainy is too widespread to be effectively delimited. What is worse, this defeatist attitude is maintained at the cost of sacrificing female heroes who could have offered an anti-patriarchal alternative instead of what they offer: mystical fantasies for men to play the role of hero.

The Night Manager: Chasing the ‘Worst Man in the World’ Pared down to its bare bones, The Night Manager tells the story of how the villain causes the hero’s beloved damsel in distress to be murdered and how in retaliation (also because he feels guilty) the hero undermines his enemy’s power and steals the princess from him. This basic patriarchal tale is adorned with all the trappings of le Carré’s elegant prose and circuitous, many-layered plotting, and set against the background of the alliance between the global arms dealing business and Colombian cocaine trafficking. The tale could be, however, set in pseudo-medieval times in the context of a fantasy story and it would work in the same way, despite the changes in patriarchy of recent times. Le Carré gives his male characters a depth and a much more complete characterization than predecessors like Sax Rohmer or Ian Fleming, yet Jonathan Pine’s adventure is not substantially different from those James Bond tackles. No wonder, then, that a reviewer defined The Night Manager as ‘Goldfinger for grown-ups’ (Remnick n.p. online). Against convention, however, and although it is unlikely that he was thinking of re-using the character in a sequel, le Carré allows villain Richard Onslow Roper to escape. With no come-uppance, the happy ending with the hero enjoying an idyllic, pastoral new life with former gangster’s moll Jemima ‘Jed’ Marshall, rings hollow. There is narrative closure but no ethical retribution. The confrontation between Roper and Pine is ultimately caused by Sophie’s death, to which I will return, but mainly based on a deeply ingrained idea of English honourability. This is the issue that motivates the man who recruits Pine, intelligence officer Leonard Burr: we are, he worries, ‘Honourable English people with self-irony and a sense of decency, people with a street spirit and a good heart. What the hell’s gone wrong with us?’ (NM 435). Whereas in the Cold War past British intelligence was jeopardized by double agents working for the USSR— like Bill Haydon, the mole Smiley unmasks—in the new 1990s climate, the main risk is internal division caused by greed. When Burr’s superior Sir Rex Goodhew discovers that Geoffrey Darker, the leader of a rival

134  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains MI6 section, is profoundly corrupt ‘it was as if the very pageantry of England was dying before his eyes’ (NM 315). Burr and Goodhew, nevertheless, are appalled by the extent of English villainy for different reasons and from different positions. Goodhew knows first-hand that ‘the Forces of Darker’ (NM 309) have combined with crooked CIA elements to obstruct his efforts to catch Roper, and thus protect their own collusion with the criminal international rings. He still believes, though, that despite some occasional lapses ‘sooner or later honour prevails and the right forces win’ (NM 397). Burr, a Yorkshireman of working-class background, feels personally insulted by the shady activities of ‘our Dicky’, as he sneeringly calls Roper. Near the end of the Cold War, Burr was already involved in operations against corrupt Englishmen. Privileged Roper, however, is Burr’s ideal enemy, the ‘personal Antichrist’ (NM 52) whom he chases to ‘appease his Fabian conscience’ (53). At stake in The Night Manager is not only Englishness but a demand for social justice motivated by class differences among what Victorian Prime Minister and novelist Benjamin Disraeli famously called the Two Nations (in the subtitle of his novel Sybil of 1845). For these reasons, Burr’s final decision to commit to Pine’s personal happiness instead of to justice, allowing Roper to escape, is so incongruous and disappointing. Roper’s backstory is made available through two main sources: Jonathan’s conversations with Sophie and Burr’s briefing. There is some covert anti-Fleming joke in the assertion that although MI6’s massive file on Roper runs ‘to eleven volumes and half a dozen secret annexes’ there are other thick files ‘at Defence, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Bank of England, the Treasury, Overseas Development, the Inland Revenue’ (NM 53). Echoing inadvertently Fleming’s characterization of the SPECTRE villains, and particularly of Emilio Largo, as herd predators, Burr curtly summarizes the nature of Roper’s villainy: he ‘plunders’ (NM 85). In contrast to ‘the ascetic villainy of ideological dinosaurs like Karla’ (Cobbs 211), le Carré’s capitalist villains enjoy a life of luxury outside the law; Roper embodies ‘evil that is purely individual and evil that prospers mightily’ (213). Roper presents himself publicly as a legitimate businessman, the owner of Nassau-based Ironbrand, a firm that deals mainly in ‘venture capital, hairy land deals, minerals, tractors, turbines, commodities, a couple of tankers, a bit of corporate raiding’ (NM 85). Weapons, or ‘toys’ as Roper calls them, however, are his ‘first love’, Burr informs Pine, because ‘Arms are a drug, and Roper’s hooked’ (86). Aged fifty in 1991, the year in which The Night Manager is set, and, therefore, presumably born in 1941, Roper has participated in many armed conflicts, from Idi Amin Dada’s dictatorship in Uganda (1971–1979) to the early stages of the Yugoslav Wars (the Croatian War of Independence started in March 1991). The end of the Cold War caused a recession in the

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  135 weapons market, only briefly reversed by the Gulf War (August 1990 to February 1991), and Roper is eager to secure a last major deal before taking early retirement. He, Burr guesses, intends to barter weapons illegally financed by Ironbrand for cocaine in order to flood the new Eastern European markets opened by the collapse of Communism. During the same briefing, Burr and Jonathan also discuss Roper’s family background, education, and accent. Roper’s family is not particularly distinguished: his father was a minor county ‘auctioneer and valuer’ (NM 87), and the boy was educated in private schools which the family hardly had the funds for. Pine identifies Roper as an Etonian because of ‘that voice. No pronouns. No articles. The slur’ (87), though for biased Burr, Roper simply has ‘one of those voices that make me vomit’ (87). The elder brother and heir squandered the family money away and Pine attributes to Roper’s sudden loss of social status his fall into villainy, making Burr positively furious: even if Roper was a millionaire on his own right, ‘he’d still be screwing up the world. He’s a villain, and you’d better believe it. Evil exists’ (87, original italics). A few months before this scene, Sophie had described Roper to ­Jonathan as ‘the worst man in the world’ (19). She is collateral damage in Roper’s villainous operations and, as a patriarchal victim, an early draft of Tessa in The Constant Gardener. A ‘languid, dark-haired beauty of forty, long-waisted, elegant and remote’ (8), French-Arab Sophie is the kept mistress of Freddie Hammid, the son of Cairo’s mafia boss and owner of the Queen Nefertiti Hotel where Jonathan is employed. Roper and Hammid are partners in a horse-breeding business and, as Sophie discovers, also weapons dealers. According to her, Roper is a ‘fiftyyear-old Apollo’ (11) and, as such, radically different from Fleming’s grotesque mature villains. He is even attractive to men’s eyes. Dr. Apollo, the lawyer employed by the Colombian Cartels, explains that Roper succeeded with his distrustful employers because he is ‘a piper of people’, who treated his clients as ‘equals’ for he is ‘a gentleman’ but ‘not a snob’ (160, my italics). Impressed, Pine starts calling Roper ‘The Man’ in his thoughts, undermining with his furtive admiration Sophie’s warnings about ‘the worst man in the world’. Sophie is in fact a victim of her naïve trust in English masculinity. ‘There is no one better than a good Englishman and no one worse than a bad one’ (10), she declares. Believing Pine to be of the first kind, she unwisely asks him to give Ogilvey, the MI6 Head of Station in Cairo, a list she has discovered by accident of the weapons which Roper and Freddie are preparing to sell. Pine complies, despite his misgivings that Ogilvey might be leaking information to the villains; when this man quickly informs Roper of Sophie’s betrayal, he orders his partner Hammid to execute Sophie, who is brutally murdered. Jonathan, in love with her though not her lover for fear of Hammid’s jealous rage, is devastated. He has betrayed her, he tells himself, ‘Because I was One of Us—Us

136  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains being Englishmen of self-evident loyalty and discretion. Us being Good Chaps’ (16, original upper case). Burr ignores Pine’s secret guilt and recruits him to catch Roper, mainly because of his military background. Jonathan’s dull job as night manager at a Zurich luxury hotel is another step in a life ‘without a destination’ (33), which includes a stint in Northern Ireland as a special serviceman. At the time when Pine agrees to play Trojan horse in Roper’s kingdom, this ‘psychologically crippled anti-hero’ (Snyder Post-Cold War 24) is struggling to overcome a deep sense of guilt not only over Sophie’s death but also over his having killed in cold blood an Irish boy misidentified as a terrorist. The suggestion that as a husband Pine was an adulterer and an abuser, which cost him a divorce he did not want, characterizes him as a faulty hero, 5 though perhaps, as the Bond series maintains, only a damaged man can face villains like Roper. Sophie wonders, as a woman, how Roper’s villainy connects with his masculinity. She does not define him as the worst person in the world but the worst man, and a conversation with Jonathan confirms that Sophie is not using ‘man’ generically: ‘How does he come to be like this? He was not dragged up in the back streets. He is blessed. You are a man. Perhaps you know’ (36). Jonathan cannot solve the riddle for her because, though a man also guilty of patriarchal faults, Pine is not interested in how patriarchal power works, just in whether his masculinity will pass the test and help him to survive. Burr discloses that Pine’s father, also a soldier, died during an undercover mission so secret that his family never knew about it. Shocked, Jonathan wonders whether he can be as admirable as this dead hero and accepts the mission expecting it ‘To make a man of me, which was what my father said the Army did: one man’ (128), meaning a whole man. He is next literally sick with apprehension, which signals the distance between the father’s discourse on proper masculinity and Pine’s masculine insecurity. A source of great disturbance in the complex relationship between the agencies chasing Roper on both sides of the Atlantic is what should be done once the villain is arrested. In current 21st century, real-life ‘arms brokers exploit loopholes and lax enforcement procedures in order to continue dealing weapons, supplying parties who brazenly violate human rights’ (Rome 1151). Aware of the situation, Burr’s American ally in the field of enforcement, Joseph Strelski, has turned his life into a mission to fight the legal network of villainy—the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats—that enable the more powerful villains to wage war against the state from within. Strelski wants Roper imprisoned for life in the harshest maximum-security American prison, whereas Burr daydreams of holding a new Nuremberg Trial in London to judge the dishonourable crooks that undermine British decency. The UK and US Governments prefer to exploit men like Roper as inside sources to protect in this way their own shady dealings. The execution of double agent Dr. Apostoll by

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  137 the Colombian cartels following a leak from Darker’s clique evidences the hypocrisy of the British inner circle and their reluctance to judge villains like Roper. There are, then, in The Night Manager ‘two contiguous, unscrupulous foes: the captain of commerce who trades in corruption and the politician who trades in venality’ (Hoffman Landscape 220), and both belong to the British establishment. Darker’s new Procurement Studies Circle emerges from the ashes of a Cold War that has left many men—for this was a war run by men—with no clear bearings about their ethics. Goodhew, in contrast, decides that this is no longer the time to sacrifice ‘scruple and principle to the great god expedience’ since ‘the excuse for doing so was dead’ (NM 63). He proceeds, accordingly, to dismantling as far as he can the formidable powers used to fight the dying Soviet Union. Darker’s accomplice Harry Palfrey, an MI6 lawyer, explains what Goodhew is missing: the men he is now chasing, trained to break all rules to defend the kingdom, fear that they will be disempowered unless they act immediately, for ‘once you are a Cold Warrior, You keep going’ (233, original upper case). It can even be argued that by obstructing Burr’s Operation Limpet with the ultra-classified Operation Flagship, Geoffrey Darker is indeed protecting British interests, though not the interests in justice and honourability which, according to Goodhew, Her Majesty’s Government should protect. Pine plays his role well and provides Burr with a long list of Roper’s illegal and legal associates, yet this crucial information does not necessarily lead to any prison sentence, as Darker makes sure. Pine infiltrates Roper’s private circle after rescuing his young son Daniel from a fake kidnapping, secretly staged by Burr. Jonathan’s ‘mildness of manner within a fighter’s frame gave him a troubling intensity’ (NM 2), which Roper finds alluring. Despite the warnings from his wary henchmen, Roper trusts Jonathan in a candid way that seems out of character for such a cautious man. The two men find themselves bonding unexpectedly, 6 maintaining long conversations during which Roper explains his philosophy. Roper lectures that ‘Armed power’s what keeps the peace. Unarmed power doesn’t last five minutes. First rule of stability’ (264). Noticing Pine’s scepticism, Roper reminisces about his idealistic youth, when he sold weapons to left-wing guerrillas before realizing that the main arms dealers are the principal governments in the world. Sophie had described Roper to Pine as a self-serving moralist, with a sense of entitlement above any principle: ‘He destroys, he makes a great fortune, so he considers himself divine’ (327). Roper sees life as a Darwinian struggle for survival, with no room for bleeding-heart liberals and conscientious law makers. When his conveniently ignorant mistress Jed finally realizes how he makes his living, she asks Roper point blank how bad he is. ‘Not bloody well bad enough!’ (344), he yells, right before defending the view that his operations are not criminal but an aspect of

138  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains world politics. Roper’s clever modus operandi and his professional display of wares—both weaponry and mercenaries—before his prospective clients appear to be almost normal business practice. Roper’s villainy does not consist of masterminding destruction for the sake of creating chaos but of responding to demand, which also depends on our individual choices. If nobody took drugs, the cartels would have no reason to buy weapons from Roper: they would cease to do business. Burr’s and Strelski’s heroic efforts are bound to fail not only because their states are riddled with corruption but also because the citizens whom they defend are fostering villainy world-wide with their personal consumption choices. The same can be said about women like Jed, and to a certain extent, Sophie. Thinking of Jed, the princess he wants to rescue, Pine concludes that Sophie was ‘a whore too (…). The difference was, she knew it’ (260). Despite his low opinion, Jonathan ruins Burr’s Operation Limpet by determining that his true goal must be freeing Jed from Roper’s clutches, though she asks for no rescue from her own choices. Jed, an upper-class English Catholic educated by nuns, claims that she was not aware of Roper’s activities because, like her chivalrous father, she always tries to be fair-minded. Some years before, Jed allowed Roper to bail her out of a reckless life of sex and drugs by, basically, purchasing her as he purchased the prize mare that became his first present. Divorced from Daniel’s mother and ageing, Roper sees in this girl, twenty years his senior, the solution to a classic male mid-life crisis. Major Corkoran, Roper’s right hand, tells Pine that Jed is his boss’s ‘virtue’ (222), talisman, pet, and mistress in one but this seems an exaggerated claim. For Jonathan, and for Roper, stunning Jed is primarily a sexual trophy. Pine, in his mid-thirties and about fifteen years younger than Roper, sees her conquest as a patriarchal challenge. The insulting words that accompany his declaration—‘I haven’t heard you express a single thought worth a damn, and most of what you say is affected bilge’ (292)—show how little he respects her. Fully aware of this, Jed, a fundamentally pragmatic woman, still shares her bed with Roper while Jonathan is being tortured by his henchmen, once his cover is blown following Apostoll’s forced confession. Unlike Sophie, she seems to entertain no illusions about the reliability of English men. There is something exceptionally awkward in the resolution of The Night Manager, mostly because Pine undermines Burr’s efforts for the love of a mercenary woman with no other personal qualities than beauty but also because it is an ‘unfortunate ex machina salvation’ (Cobbs 221). Roper may be mortified by his foe’s victory over Jed—though he seems mainly disenchanted with Jonathan’s treachery as a friend—but the one who is truly humiliated is Burr. He must improvise a hazardous ruse to save the couple and, once the charade plays out, he is forced to offer Roper a deal by which all charges against him and his most direct

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  139 criminal associates—including Darker and Palfrey—will be dropped. Burr still vows to chase Roper for as long as he lives but this is an empty threat. While releasing Jed and Pine, Roper boasts that the weapons have been delivered and the deal with the Colombians concluded with only minor losses. As their boat leaves Roper’s yacht, Jed takes a last look at him and still sees ‘a clean-cut, amusing English gentleman, perfect for his generation’ (470).7 Under Burr’s protection, Pine enjoys a quiet life with Jed in the English countryside, including the prize mare Roper gave her and that so closely attached is to her characterization as a treasured animal. Though no hero, Jonathan gets a reward which he does not deserve from the man he has most profoundly betrayed. Pine risks his life but he does his country a great disservice by chasing the princess rather than the dragon. His sexual obsession for Jed allows Roper to avoid Burr’s unwanted attention at least temporarily, which makes this officer’s satisfaction with Pine’s performance quite inexplicable. Unless, that is, we read The Night Manager as a tale about patriarchal sexual solidarity in which Burr allows Pine’s conquest of Jed to take precedence over the community’s demand for justice against powerful villains like Roper. ‘One of the main messages of The Night Manager’, Aronoff argues, ‘is that it takes a great deal more than idealism and good intentions to defeat evil’ (100). This seems insufficient justification. The immorality of Roper’s (and of ­Darker’s) activities conceals even greater immorality condoned by Burr: the gentleman’s selfish pursuit of sexual satisfaction matters here far more than justice, even more than heroism. Le Carré celebrates as a romantic choice an ending which is simply indefensible on ethical grounds and that only helps the patriarchal villain to go on enjoying his criminal life.

The Constant Gardener: Betrayal and the Network of Villainy In The Constant Gardener, le Carré tells another male-centred story, erected on the dead body of a woman who could have easily been the heroic protagonist. Unlike Sophie, Tessa Abbott Quayle has a respectable English upper-class social background, solid professional credentials as a lawyer, and a firm determination to work for justice as an activist. Despite her obvious qualifications to fight villainy, le Carré imagines an atrocious death for Tessa and gives the role of hero to her widower, bland, gentlemanly Justin Quayle. Like Pine, Justin is motivated by his sense of guilt over the death of the woman he loves, yet whereas Pine is in no position to protect Sophie from her criminal lover, Quayle is not only Tessa’s husband but also a representative of the British Government. The plot supposes that Tessa’s tragedy is caused by the fear that her activities might destroy Justin’s diplomatic career in the Foreign Office, mediocre as it is. Nevertheless, the real reason why she never discloses to

140  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains him the enormity of the villainous plot she unearths is that their happy marriage is based on a profound incapacity to communicate with each other. Tessa is made extremely vulnerable, then, not by her findings but by her decision to keep her struggle secret from her husband and impose, in view of Justin’s limitations, a regime of, as he calls it, ‘marital apartheid’ (CG 217). Since she cannot see Justin as her champion in her challenge against British patriarchal villainy, Tessa makes a critical mistake. She seeks the help of another man, Sandy Woodrow, who turns out to be a member of the ‘the labyrinth of monstrosities’ (CG 231) which ultimately causes her death. Grace Musila argues convincingly that Tessa’s death strongly recalls that of Julie Ann Ward, 8 a publishing assistant and amateur photographer who was gang-raped and dismembered while visiting the Kenyan Maasai Mara Game Reserve in September 1988. Musila sees clear links between le Carré’s novel and the volume by this girl’s father, John Ward, The Animals Are Innocent: The Search for Julie’s Killers (1991). Ward’s personal investigation was constantly hindered by the Kenyan authorities, either because they were afraid that Julie Ann’s death would affect tourism negatively or because President Moi allegedly wished to protect members of his family from suspicion; the fact is that her murderers were never caught. John Ward did not question the position of the British High Commission in Nairobi, but Musila suspects that they may have been in collusion with the local authorities to safeguard unknown interests. This is what happens in Tessa’s case. Musila concludes that Julie Ward’s murder, like Tessa’s, should forewarn us about ‘the co-­existence of sometimes coinciding circles of influence, which reconfigure hierarchical patterns of power relations between the dominant group and the subordinate group’ (58). These circles— ­ onstrosities—demonstrate that Manichean le Carré’s labyrinth of m morality should be ­abandoned for an examination of ‘the highly nuanced textures of complicity that often lie beneath superficial constructions of polar binaries’ (Musila 58), and, no doubt, of villainy. Tessa and her friend Dr. Arnold Bluhm discover that Sir Kenneth K.  Curtiss’s company —Bell, Barker and Benjamin (popularly known as ThreeBees)—is aiding its business partner, the international pharmaceutical corporation Karel Vita Hudson (KHV), to test illegally among the poorest in Kenya the drug which might stop tuberculosis, Dypraxa. The death of teenager Wanza and of her newly born baby, in the same hospital where Tessa gives birth to her stillborn son, alerts her and Arnold to the suspicious presence of Dutchman Markus Lorbeer. He turns out to be the agent that closed the deal between KHV and the scientists that developed Dypraxa. These are a German woman named Kovacs, who is happy enough to keep under wraps KHV’s murderous methods for money and academic fame, and Russian Lara Emrich, the main discoverer of the drug. Emrich eventually realizes that the side effects of

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  141 Dypraxa are potentially lethal and that KHV is concealing any inconvenient evidence from its own reports. Her efforts to convey her findings to the academic community are, however, curtailed by the pharma at each step. Tessa and Arnold submit a twenty-page report documenting almost thirty cases, similar to Wanza’s, to the British Government. Their decision to present this report as an ultimatum intended to force the authorities to act in under three months against ThreeBees and KHV stirs, logically, a hornets’ nest. Ultimately, Tessa and Arnold become victims of ‘corporate murder’ (CG 171),9 instigated by the treacherous Lorbeer and executed by local thugs for hire. Fearing for his own life, Lorbeer betrays them to retrieve the tapes of an interview in which he speaks candidly about his remorse and repentance, a conversation which provides Tessa and Arnold as well with abundant proof of the crimes committed by his employers. The pair are brutally murdered, ‘leaving us to fend for ourselves with whatever conscience and courage we can muster. This, I think le Carré might agree, is what has happened to capitalism in the absence of an opponent’ (Hoffman ‘Constant Writer’ 107). The diffuse villainy that le Carré portrays extends above and below, constituting what Lorbeer himself calls the ‘forces of darkness’ (377), a concept that connects with Geoffrey Darker’s circle in The Night Manager. The whole labyrinth of monstrosities is sustained by greed and corruption and has a characteristically patriarchal, patrician disregard for the rights and lives of individual persons. This is clear on the British side. In the specific case of ‘dangerous, decaying, plundered, bankrupt, once-British Kenya’ (CG 12), as Sandy Woodrow describes the country, President Daniel arap Moi (1978–2002) is presented as an enabler of widespread corruption and upholder of extremely negative ethical ­values. As a matter of fact, Tessa allows everyone to believe that she is having a scandalous inter-racial affair with Arnold because she is anxious about his exposure as a homosexual, which would mean his immediate incarceration under Moi’s homophobic legislation. KHV of Basel, Vancouver, and Seattle are an example of how supposedly working for the general good and ‘Under the guise of investment, Western capital ruins the native environment and favours the rise of kleptocracies’ (CG 186). Even aid to the Third World is part of the kleptocracy, for, in Justin’s summary of Tessa’s views, ‘The beneficiaries are the countries that supply the money on interest, local African politicians and officials who pocket huge bribes, and the Western contractors and arms suppliers who walk away with huge profits’ (186). As a corporation, KVH has no face—we never meet its CEO, Board of Directors, or investors; even their corporate executions are ordered by anonymous middle-men. Lorbeer and Emrich try each in their own way to cut the ties with their puppet-master but KHV is an unstoppable juggernaut. Lorbeer’s ‘morbid religious conceptions and his desire to confess’

142  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains (CG 369) prompt him to send an anonymous account of the horrors caused by Dypraxa to a small German NGO, which is easily neutralized by KHV, after which he must go into hiding. Emrich, who sees her career destroyed by KHV’s promise to offer the Canadian university which employs her a share of the Dypraxa profits, only wishes she could undo the harm caused: ‘Since the drug is killing patients I would wish very much that I had not invented it’ (CG 433). Whereas KHV and its employees form the international branch of villainy in The Constant Gardener, the English contribution to the forces of darkness results from the combination of business and political interests through the ambition of specific patriarchal men attached to the Foreign Office and to MI6. The main villain is Under-secretary Sir Bernard Pellegrin, the Foreign Office’s Director of Affairs for Africa: he causes Tessa’s report to be suppressed and informs KHV of its existence, hoping to obtain a directorship before his retirement. In any case, his power to carry out these criminal actions is granted but also limited by the Foreign Office, which essentially backs Pellegrin because he is protecting British interests and, particularly, ThreeBees. The other main English villain, ThreeBee’s CEO Curtiss, is, in Sandy Woodrow’s words, ‘the darling of African leaders’, whom he showers with abundant bribes, and ‘a major national asset. Plus he’s in bed with half the British Cabinet, which doesn’t do him any harm’ (496). As Curtiss’s police file shows, his company, which also deals in weapons legally and illegally, has a ‘Finger in every African pie’ but is ‘British to the core’ (127). In Kenya, they are complicit with Moi’s repressive policies. The flashy, vulgar play-boy Curtiss wants to cap his rags-to-riches biography by becoming Lord Curtiss of Nairobi and Spennymoor,10 for which he is not only funding the party in power but also spying for MI6. He is slow to understand, however, that as far as KHV is concerned, he is an expendable pawn in Africa and ThreeBees just a tiny morsel about to be swallowed by them. Curtiss and Pellegrin are cold-hearted psychopaths, incapable of understanding that Tessa’s gang rape and murder and Arnold’s torture and cruel execution leave Justin Quayle deeply distressed. Curtiss wants him eliminated, just as he wanted Tessa and her constant harassment of ThreeBees stopped by any means. Pellegrin threatens Justin with ending his diplomatic career if he does not hand over her private papers but, retaining them, Quayle embarks on a clandestine investigation of his wife’s death. Pellegrin retaliates by presenting him as a mentally ill man and a danger to the British Government. Curtiss’s and Pellegrin’s respective type of villainy is transparently tied to personal ambition, particularly to the social rewards attached to titles and materialized in the high living of the very rich which Justin puts at risk. Le Carré is nevertheless more interested in how these men’s villainy benefits from the personal betrayal of Tessa by those who claimed to love her: Sandy Woodrow but

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  143 also Justin. This is a betrayal deeply connected with the idea of English honourability, both on the ethical and the romantic front. Tessa and Justin meet when she asks him a thorny question at the end of a rather vague lecture he delivers: ‘Why do you have to be a citizen of a country before you make a judgment about it? You negotiate with other countries, don’t you? You cut deals with them. You legitimize them through trading partnerships. Are you telling us there’s one ethical standard for your country and another for the rest?’ (157, original italics) He rephrases her intervention as ‘What is an ethical foreign policy?’ (158, original italics), and although the scene is intended to be mainly a turning point in their romance, Justin’s question is also the key to the politics of this novel. Justin saves young, naïve, idealist Tessa from public embarrassment by taking her question seriously and she decides on the spot that the much older, courteous Justin will make an ideal, protective husband. Once in Kenya, ‘the Society Girl Turned Oxbridge Lawyer, the Princess of the African Poor, the Mother Teresa of the Nairobi Slums and the FO Angel Who Gave a Damn’ (CG 69, original upper case), realizes that her gentle husband, a modest First Secretary in the Nairobi Chancery and the British representative on the ironically named East African Donors’ Effectiveness Committee, is in no position to help her fulfil her demand for an ethical foreign policy. His ‘Etonian chivalry’ (440) is so insufficient that, after the death of their baby Garth, Tessa turns for comfort to Arnold Bluhm, ‘her moral tutor, black knight, protector in the aid jungle’ (29), as le Carré describes him, and a most undervalued hero in The Constant Gardener. Aware of his own shortcomings, Justin endorses her friendship with ‘charismatic, witty, beautiful’ (35) Bluhm without fear of scandal but also with no wish to meddle in Tessa’s proaid activism. Their frail marriage is, for these reasons, questioned. Quayle’s boss Alison Landsbury clarifies that asking him to keep Tessa in check would have been ‘sexist’; yet, she finds what he describes as the ‘arrangement’ by which Tessa shared no information with him ‘awfully hard to believe’ (214). Justin agrees, acknowledging his cowardice. When Scotland Yard police officers Rob and Lesley wonder during their interrogatory how the marriage could survive, Quayle replies that ‘We didn’t survive’ (169)—at least, Tessa did not. In his review, fellow novelist Giles Foden commends Justin’s ‘diffidence’ as a ‘powerful attribute when you are surrounded by scoundrels’ (n.p. online). In fact, le Carré uses Quayle to consider whether inaction is a type of complicity with villainy. Justin assumes his wife’s quest ‘trying to make amends’ (CG 139) but when he accuses Sandy Woodrow of having betrayed Tessa, whom he supposedly loves, Quayle must accept this deceitful man’s judgment: ‘We all betrayed her’ (502). Tessa also betrays

144  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains herself by wrongly assuming that Justin would remain loyal to Britain first if asked to choose between the Crown and his wife. Her own choice of a ‘five-star megacreep with the hots for me’ (275), as she describes Woodrow to her cousin and confidant Ham, and her ill-advised decision to (platonically) flirt with him to achieve her ends are also self-betrayals. Le Carré’s imprudent decision to focalize the first six chapters through Woodrow elicits, besides, sympathy for the ‘megacreep’, which negatively affects the reader’s ability to properly judge him. When Justin is finally used as a focalizer, from Chapter 7 onwards, Sandy emerges as a sexual harasser who has somehow convinced himself that he loves Tessa. Justin is a very different kind of man but perhaps they both share the same illusion that they love Tessa when they only love their subjective, private image of her. The focalization through Woodrow makes Tessa appear to be far colder and manipulative than she really is. Quayle, besides, only fully commits to Tessa’s mission after discovering that Bluhm is gay. In his review of Fernando Mereilles’s successful 2005 film adaptation, Gallafent claims that Quayle’s quest involves not just a new view of his dead wife but also a renewed self-understanding. This might sound positive if it weren’t because the change requires her demise: the ‘needs and desires’ of the living Tessa posed ‘a possible threat. Once she is dead and the anxieties those desires gave rise to are dismissed, [Justin] becomes the ideal bereaved lover whose existence is devoted to her memory’ (n.p. online). In their critique of le Carré’s use of privileged, white Tessa as a synecdoche for the poor, black Africans with no voice in the novel, Masemola and Makoe note that the supposed infidelity with Arnold, to which Tessa’s death is initially attributed, connects with the blaming for the genocidal spread of HIV/Aids on the Africans’ alleged promiscuity. The same ‘logic of the British imperial vision’ and ‘the patriarchal discourse that regulates and qualifies sexual behaviour’ are expressed in a punishing ‘clinical discourse that equates infidelity with promiscuity’ (73). Likewise, for much of The Constant Gardener African Bluhm is suspected of being Tessa’s promiscuous lover and murderer, and she of being immorally unfaithful. If with Justin’s characterization le Carré raises the issue of inaction, in Sandy’s case he questions whether any collusion with power amounts to a type of villainy. Woodrow, Nairobi’s Head of Chancery, a man in his forties like Justin and, also like him, a diplomatic with almost twenty years in the profession, lusts after beautiful, sexy Tessa. In her naïve attempt at playing femme fatale, Tessa nonetheless overlooks an important fact: Sandy’s lust for a knighthood is much stronger than his lust for her, and so is his ambition to be appointed High Commissioner. She first attempts to attract Woodrow to the cause of Africa against KVH at Uhuru hospital, where he finds her breastfeeding Wanza’s sick baby. Sandy recalls the scene and her plea for a champion as part of Tessa’s ‘theatrical

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  145 urges’ (123). His short-lived promise to be that champion is based on desire, not empathy. When she hands him the report, Woodrow tries to silence Tessa, criticising her for not being a reliable team-player and reminding her as well that the High Commission ‘shares your disgust, but still we do not protest’ because ‘we are here, mercifully, to represent our country, not theirs’ (59, original italics). He points out, too, that ‘it’s not as if we Brits were above corruption ourselves’ (61). This is Sandy’s own answer to her original question of whether a foreign policy can be ethical. Ignoring her disgust and his own feelings for Tessa, Sandy sends the report to Pellegrin, knowing that he will ignore the evidence proving that dishonest Kenyan ministers are allowing the Dypraxa tests to be run. Additionally, he hypocritically colludes with Pellegrin in misrepresenting Justin as a madman and the late Tessa as a mother ‘pretty much unhinged’ (105) after the death of her baby. Woodrow’s personal betrayal of Tessa is villainous but perhaps even worse is his inability to feel concern for the victims of Dypraxa. ‘We’re not killing people who wouldn’t otherwise die’, he tells an appalled Justin. ‘I mean, Christ, look at the death rate in this place. Not that anybody’s counting’ (497). In fact, Tessa and Arnold were counting: this is the reason why they are executed. In the same final interview, Sandy tells Justin that if Tessa decided to approach him and not the Belgian Government (Arnold is a citizen of Belgium by adoption), this is because ‘She clung to a pathetic notion that the Brits had more integrity—virtue in government—than any other nation’ (498, original italics), an optimistic lesson learned from her father, a judge. Bluhm apparently agreed, either because he is also too trusting or because the Belgian medical NGO which he works for is too small to stir much any media attention. Once it becomes apparent that the Foreign Office will sit on their report, Arnold and Tessa set their hopes on Richard Leakey, the real-life, white Kenyan politician. They are on their way to visit him, carrying Lorbeer’s confessional tapes, when they are murdered. Justin’s attempt to complete Tessa’s mission focuses on his personal sense of guilt and is missing a truly pragmatic approach to the problem of how to reveal the widespread villainy that crushed her and Arnold. Quayle never contacts Leakey, he bypasses the media, and leaves all the evidence he gathers in the hands of Tessa’s cousin and trusted lawyer, Ham. Justin is constantly under mortal threat, but he does not prove that he possesses the integrity and virtue which Tessa sought. He just proves himself to himself and under his own pseudo-­ chivalric terms. ‘The sources of imperialism and the sources of the Victorian code of the gentleman’, Girouard notes ‘are so intertwined that it is not surprising to find this code affecting the way in which the Empire was run’ (224). Justin’s narrative arc shows that the gentleman still feeds the machinery of post-colonial global capitalism, though the narrative of

146  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains African adventure has been re-written. He is not facing the same test as the Victorian gentlemen who chose Africa ‘to prove their “manhood”’ after reading ‘avidly about white men’s adventures in the “Dark Continent”’ (Segal 145). Nor does le Carré repeat the scheme by which black African men served ‘as the necessary foil, the essential opposition, giving substance to the superiority of the white man’ (Segal 145). In this update, Justin’s ‘metanoia’ (Snyder Art 126), or as Foden calls it his ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ (n.p. online) is elicited by Tessa’s post-humous challenge to finally man up and be a proper English gentleman. Justin obeys in part her summons, but his death also suggests that his newly found energy to fight for justice is temporary. Justin’s predictable but unnecessary murder, in the same location where Tessa and Arnold are killed, is disguised by the complicit British press as a romantic suicide. Le Carré himself justifies the ending, for ‘I’m nothing, if not a romantic, in some respects’. Quayle dies, the author adds, ‘as part of the mission, and you may say that he joins her, makes a similar sacrifice’ (in Goodman n.p. online). His words disregard an important plot point of his own making: Tessa very much wanted to live so as to carry on her fight, whereas Justin allows himself to be killed in a suicidal act she might not have understood at all. McGowan11 insists that Justin ‘neither tries to die nor tries to survive’ since he ‘no longer exists in an everyday relationship to time where he can expect a future and recall a past’ (71). This is a certainly mystifying comment, closer to the romantic ending of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights than to a novel about the villainy of the ‘Big Pharmas’, as they are colloquially known, in Kenya. More pragmatically, García-Mainar suggests that stories like The Constant Gardener express a ‘concern with the unbearable weight laid on the shoulders of individuals by first borrowing conventions of the suspense thriller and then having them overlapped, even at times replaced, by those of melodrama’ (6). Whereas the brutalized bodies of Tessa and Arnold belong to the former sub-genre, Justin’s unseen death belongs to the latter. The gentleman may join his lady in the afterlife but with his final melodramatic withdrawal, Justin also re-affirms his wish to stop fighting the monsters in the labyrinth. He leaves other potential victims, in Africa and elsewhere, unprotected from the faceless network of ever-expanding patriarchal villainy. Heroic gentlemanliness may survive romantically but this is not what Tessa, the damsel in distress, needs. Ham manages to suborn a Scottish MP into asking in the British Parliament inconvenient questions about Tessa and Arnold’s report to the Foreign Office Secretary. The petition to have it released (and Bluhm’s papers) cannot succeed immediately in the slow-moving courts, but at least it alerts the general opinion to the fact that KHV is the company which Tessa and Arnold were investigating. This gives a minimal come-uppance to the main villains—presumably, KHV loses part of its

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  147 value for investors—but it is a pyrrhic victory. The other monsters in the labyrinth (Pellegrin, Curtiss, Sandy) reap the rewards they aimed at, though Lorbeer and Emrich are left stranded in a kind of narrative limbo. The auxiliary heroes that try to help Tessa and, later, Justin—ex High Commissioner Porter Coleridge, his young employee Ghita Pearson, police officers Rob and Lesley, Wanza’s brother Kioko, even secret agent Troi Donohue—are swept aside by rampant villainy. Le Carré’s pessimism about the mechanisms to erode patriarchal villainy can be read as pragmatism, even cynicism, regarding the low standing that doing good seems to have in our days. There is much patriarchal hypocrisy, nevertheless, in his authorial choices. It should be evident that the plot of The Constant Gardener is gratuitously focused on Justin; Tessa and Arnold could have easily played a protagonist role and Quayle be just a secondary character. She has qualities enough, as I have shown, whereas Arnold is, in the words of police officer Lesley ‘as close as you’ll ever get to a good man’ (103, original italics) with a biography full of generous, heroic deeds. He is clearly characterized as a hero, but le Carré chooses to push this African man to the background of his African story and have the spotlight fall on the far more irrelevant Quayle.12 Given a choice between two possible male heroes, le Carré chooses a white heterosexual European foreigner over a black, homosexual, local African man. This racism is also part of patriarchy. In a similar vein, though Tessa is mourned by the women of the Nairobi slum of Kibera, many of them her clients in cases of ‘Property rights, divorce, physical abuse, marital rape, female circumcision, safe sex’ (CG 28), she is a privileged British white woman and not a native. Presumably, le Carré agrees with the view of his characters when they praise African women: High Commissioner Porter Coleridge proposes that men ‘Give Africa to the women and the place might work’ (35) and even Lorbeer agrees that the women are ‘the only hope of Africa’ (529). In this man’s view, ‘The women make the homes, the men make the wars. The whole of Africa, that’s one big gender fight, man’ (530). Le Carré, though, is far from ready to place an African woman at the centre of his tale of patriarchal villainy. He inserts Dypraxa’s victim Wanza at the core of Tessa’s quest but the story of their patriarchal victimization by European white men is, patently, a tale of how Justin, a privileged European white man, learns to be a hero. The authorial choices, and the rewards which the villains acquire, do little to bring African women to the foreground of a fight that, according to le Carré’s own male characters, only they can win. For all his good intentions, le Carré is as guilty of Afropessimism—‘the consistently negative view that Africa is incapable of progressing, economically, socially, or politically’ (Evans and Glenn 14–15)—as much as predecessors like Conrad. Chinua Achebe famously wrote that ‘Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its

148  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains iron tooth’ (13). Le Carré denounces the racism of the white capitalist network of villainy but he still needs a white male hero to articulate his story. Le Carré’s romantic proclivities, in short, cannot ultimately dispel the disturbing impression that whereas villainy grows in real and fictional Britain, male heroism is waning, and, what is more disappointing, no alternative female and/or non-white heroes can yet be welcome.

Notes 1 David Cornwell, the author’s real name, had to take a pen name at the start of his literary career in the early 1960s because he was then attached to MI6 as a Foreign Office civil servant. He has given diverse versions of why he chose the French surname le Carré (meaning ‘the square’) despite his English roots and German-language education in Switzerland. He has never fully explained, either, his tasks as a spy, which were possibly mid-level and involved non-violent interrogation of Communist defectors. Le Carré’s only authorized biography, by Adam Sisman, was published in 2015. Le Carré published an autobiographical volume shortly thereafter, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016), of which he told Sisman nothing. This consists, as the title warns, of anecdotal memoirs rather than a systematic account of his life. 2 The name of the man hiding behind the codename Karla is never revealed. The female alias supposedly refers to the first spy network he set up, though it is hinted that Karla was the name of a dead woman he loved in his youth. 3 Ronnie Cornwell (1906–1975) was a professional conman. Le Carré has often explained that he and his elder brother Anthony were given an u ­ ppermiddle-class education because his father lived through them the fantasy of being accepted as a gentleman. Le Carré has also maintained that the combination of his father’s schemes, in which he was occasionally forced to participate, with his privileged school life gave him the education in secrecy which he later deployed in his life as a spy. See his article ‘In Ronnie’s Court’ (2002). 4 The post-WWII professional agent, Sauerberg maintains, is, nonetheless, frequently an amateur at some favourite pursuit favoured by gentlemen of leisure. ‘Bond is a better-than-average golfer, Smiley is deeply interested in 17th-century German literature’ (103), whereas Justin Quayle’s passion for plants explains the title The Constant Gardener. 5 ‘All characters’, le Carré has explained ‘are to some extent amalgams of people you meet, people you observe’ but ‘most central characters, most three-dimensional characters are to some extent examinations of the possibilities of one’s own character’. Pine, like his other main characters, is the answer to a key question: ‘If I’d received the wrong advice, if I’d responded differently to certain events, who would I have become?’ (in Rose online video). 6 Le Carré only noticed that their bonding is homoerotic while watching the 2016 BBC mini-series, wondering whether this impression was created on purpose by director Susanne Bier or the actors playing Pine (Tom Hiddleston) and Roper (Hugh Laurie). Intrigued, le Carré observes that Roper ‘actually enjoys being a partner in his own destruction, just for the pleasure of pairing with someone as intelligent and ruthless as himself; almost as if he’s a little in love with his own executioner’ (in ‘Adaptations’ online).

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  149 7 The BBC’s The Night Manager completely altered this ending in order to prolong the series in a second season. In this adaptation, updated to our days, pregnant Angela Burr outwits the ‘Forces of Darker’, Jonathan prevents the weapons sale, and Roper receives (presumably) his just deserts from his irate business allies. The new ending goes ‘much further than the novel in redeeming the traditional Buchanesque gentleman hero, who re-emerges triumphant in the era of “quality” television with the moral anxieties of the Cold War period entirely swept away’ (Oldham 302). 8 In a heartfelt tribute, le Carré named a close friend, French activist Yvette Pierpaoli (1938–1999), as the muse who inspired Tessa: ‘And though by age, occupation, nationality, and birth my Tessa was far removed from Yvette, Tessa’s commitment to the poor of Africa, particularly its women, her contempt for protocol, and her unswerving, often maddening determination to have her way stemmed quite consciously so far as I was concerned, from Yvette’s example’ (‘Constant Muse’ n.p. online). Pierpaoli died in a car crash, aged sixty-one, the same week le Carré arrived in Kenya to start research for his novel, which is dedicated to her. 9 Science journalist Sonia Shah notes with bitterness that ‘in real life, bad drugs and unethical research practices often continue unhindered despite mountains of data and reports detailing their defects’ (n.p. online). Le Carré wrote the foreword for Shah’s The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients (2006). 10 James Bond and John le Carré have one thing in common: both mistrust the honours cherished by villains like Curtiss. Le Carré has accepted French and German medals but has rejected being ‘called a Commander of the British Empire or any other thing of the British Empire. I find it emetic’ (in Kroft n.p. online). 11 McGowan refers to the film adaptation, but the point is equally valid. Indeed, though scholarship on The Constant Gardener refers mainly to the film the plot points most often discussed are those borrowed from the novel. García-Mainar’s article, which places Mereilles’s film at the centre of the current he calls New Individualism, follows the same pattern, and so does Gallafent’s short essay. 12 A patriarchal victim like Tessa, Bluhm is kidnapped and later killed in an extremely vicious way which also sexualizes him. When he is eventually found, the police report that he had been castrated, his mouth stuffed with his genitalia, and then crucified alive.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987. London, etc.: Heinemann, 1988. 1–13. Aronoff, Myron Joel. ‘Post-Cold War Good and Evil: The Night Manager’. The Spy Novels of John le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. 99–102. Berberich, Christine. The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-­ Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Bianculli, David. ‘Master Spy Storyteller: John le Carré’. Author Interviews, Fresh Air, NPR 26 August 2005 (original air date 30 May 1989). www.npr. org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4817316. Audio

150  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains Britton, Wesley Alan. ‘From George Smiley to Bernard Sampson: The Counter-­ Fleming Movement’. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. 123–146. Cobbs, John L. ‘Better than Bond: The Night Manager’. Understanding John le Carré. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1998. 210–223. Evans, Martha & Ian Glenn ‘“TIA-This Is Africa”: Afropessimism in Twenty-­ First-Century Narrative Film’. Black Camera 2.1 (Winter 2010): 14–35. Foden, Giles. ‘Garden of Good and Evil: Giles Foden sees John le Carré, Chronicler of the Cold War, Find New Enemies in The Constant Gardener’. The Guardian 23 December 2000. http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/general fiction/0,414785,00.html Gallafent, Edward. ‘Intuitions in Africa: Personal and Political Knowledge in The Constant Gardener’. CineAction 70 (November 2006): 59–65. www.the freelibrary.com/Intuitions+in+Africaa+personal+and+political+knowledge+ in+the…-a0155477211 García-Mainar, Luis M. ‘Contemporary Hollywood Crime Film and the New Individualism’. European Journal of American Studies 4.2 (Autumn 2009): n.p. online. https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/7650 Girouard, Mark. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP, 1981. Goodman, Amy. ‘Exclusive: British Novelist John le Carré on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa and His New Novel, Our Kind of Traitor’. Democracy Now! 11 October 2010. www.democracynow. org/2010/10/11/exclusive_british_novelist_john_le_carr. Video transcript and video Goodman, Sam. British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire. New York: Routledge, 2016. Goodwin, Jonathan. ‘John le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim and the End of the Cold War’. Clues 28.1 (Spring 2010): 102–109. Hindersmann, Jost. “‘The Right Side Lost but the Wrong Side Won”: John le Carré’s Spy Novels before and after the End of the Cold War’. Clues 23.4 (Summer 2005): 25–37. Hoffman, Tod. ‘The Constant Writer: le Carré Spies a New Villain’. Queen’s Quarterly 108.1 (Spring 2001): 99–107. ———. Le Carré’s Landscape. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001. Kroft, Steve. ‘Ex-British Spy on Leading a “Double Life” as a Famous Author’. 60 Minutes CBS 21 January 2018. www.cbsnews.com/news/john-lecarre-ex-british-spys-double-life-as-a-famous-author-1/ le Carré, John. A Legacy of Spies. London: Viking, 2017. ———. ‘John le Carré on The Night Manager and Other Adaptations of his Books’. Articles, Penguin 13 July 2016. www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2016/ john-le-carre-of-books-and-movies/ ———. The Pigeon Tunnel. London: Viking, 2016. ———. ‘In Ronnie’s Court: A Son’s Criminal Pursuit’. The New Yorker 18 February 2002. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/02/18/in-ronnies-court ———. ‘The Constant Muse’. The Guardian 25 February 2001. www.the guardian.com/books/2001/feb/25/fiction.features2 ———. The Constant Gardener (2000). London: Hodder, 2005. ———. The Night Manager (1993). London: Penguin, 2013.

Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains  151 ———. The Secret Pilgrim (1991). London: Sceptre, 2006. ———. Smiley’s People (1979). London: Penguin, 2018. ———. The Honourable Schoolboy (1977). London: Penguin, 2018. ———. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). London: Penguin, 2018. Manning, Toby. ‘Fanatics and Absolutists: Communist Monsters in John le Carré’s Cold War Fiction’. Disgust and Desire: The Paradox of the Monster, Kristen Wright (ed.). Leiden & Boston, MA: Brill-Rodopi, 2018. 43–67. ———. John le Carré and the Cold War. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Martín, Sara. ‘The Silent Villain: The Minimalist Construction of Patriarchal Villainy in John Le Carré’s Karla Trilogy’. Villains and Villainy: Embodiments of Evil in Literature, Popular Media and Culture, Anna Fahraeus & Dikmen Yakalı-Çamoğlu (eds.). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. 29–46. Masemola, Kgomotso & Pinky Makoe. ‘Synecdoche and Allegory in the Filmic Record of the Memory of African Genocide in John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener’. Journal of Literary Studies 30.3 (September 2014): 67–77. McGowan, Todd. ‘The Temporality of the Real: The Path to Politics in The Constant Gardener’. Film-Philosophy 11.3 (2007): 52–73. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and the Subjection of Women (1869). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006. Monaghan, David. ‘John le Carré and England: A Spy-Eye’s View’. Modern Fiction Studies 29.3 (Autumn 1983): 569–582. Musila, Grace A. ‘Submerged Fault Lines: Interests and Complicities in the Julie Ward Case’. Kunapipi 34.1 (2012): 42–59, 190. Oldham, Joseph. ‘From Reverential to “Radical” Adaptation: Reframing John le Carré as “Quality” Television Brand from A Perfect Spy (BBC 2, 1987) to The Night Manager (BBC 1, 2016)’. Adaptation 10.3 (December 2017): 285–304. Plimpton, George. ‘John le Carré: The Art of Fiction’. Paris Review 143 (Summer 1997): 50–74. www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1250/john-le-carre-theart-of-fiction-no-149-john-le-carre Remnick, David. ‘Le Carré’s New War’. The New York Review of Books 12 August 1993. www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/08/12/le-carres-new-war/ Rome, Leigh. ‘The Case for Prosecuting Arms Traffickers in the International Criminal Court’. Cardozo Law Review 36 (2014–2015): 1149–1189. Rose, Charlie. ‘John le Carré’. Charlie Rose 1 July 1993. https://charlierose. com/videos/18937. Video. Sands, Philippe. ‘John le Carré’. Hay Festival 31 May 2013. www.hayfestival. com/p-5496-john-le-carre.aspx?skinid=16. Video. Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Secret Agents in Fiction: Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Len Deighton. London: Macmillan, 1984. Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. London: Palgrave, 2007. Sexton, David. ‘A Legacy of Spies: Why John le Carré’s 25th Novel Is Set to Be the Literary Event of the Autumn’. Evening Standard 21 August 2017. www. standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/a-legacy-of-spies-why-john-le-carr-s-25thnovel-is-set-to-be-the-literary-event-of-the-autumn-a3616421.html Shah, Sonia. The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients. New York and London: The New Press, 2006.

152  Le Carré’s Post-Cold War Villains ———. ‘The Constant Gardener: What the Movie Missed’. The Nation 30 August 2005. www.thenation.com/article/constant-gardener-what-movie-missed/ Sisman, Adam. John le Carré: The Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 2015. Snyder, Robert Lance. ‘The Night Manager and Our Game: “We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us”’. John le Carré’s Post-Cold War Fiction. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2017. 21–46. Snyder, Robert Lance. ‘John le Carré’s Post-Cold War Labyrinths’. The Art of Indirection in British Espionage Fiction: A Critical Study of Six Novelists. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 112–145. Stafford, David A. T. ‘Spies and Gentlemen: The Birth of the British Spy Novel, 1893–1914’. Victorian Studies 24.4 (1981): 489–509. Wolfe, Peter. Corridors of Deceit: The World of John le Carré. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987.

7 Michael Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy Democracy at Risk

The Rise of the Villainous Prime Minister: The Instability of Power The Right Honourable Francis Ewan Urquhart is one of the greatest villains of recent British fiction. He is also a character particularly difficult to pin down because of the ad hoc development of the novels by English author Michael Dobbs in which Urquhart originally appeared. The acclaimed Netflix series House of Cards (2013–2019), created by Beau Willimon, was inspired by three BBC mini-series: House of Cards (1990), To Play the King (1993), and The Final Cut (1995), all produced by Ken Riddington and scripted by Andrew Davies.1 Dobbs’s first novel was not written, however, to be part of a trilogy but as a stand-alone text. The very existence of the second novel and the nuances of its plot were conditioned by the success of the first BBC mini-series, which introduced important changes in Urquhart’s fate. In his novel House of Cards Dobbs gives his power-hungry Scottish Tory politician his come-­uppance when young, heroic journalist Mattie Storin threatens to expose his crimes. In contrast, in the mini-series Urquhart gets away with Mattie’s murder (she is here his devoted mistress) to start a successful career as Prime Minister, after scheming his way into the party’s leadership from his initial position as Chief Whip. 2 The lack of retribution was a key element in the success of the BBC series but became eventually problematic. Dobbs’s second novel narrates how Urquhart’s mandate as Prime Minister leads to a confrontation with the new King, who insists, against convention, on expressing his own political opinions. Dobbs leads Urquhart to a second final humiliation, this time orchestrated by the alliance between media mogul Benjamin Landless (Mattie’s employer in House of Cards), his American mistress Sally Quine (also Urquhart’s lover), and the King, who decides to abdicate and therefore be free to alter British politics as he wishes. Davies and the BBC took once more Dobbs’s plot in quite a different direction, replacing Landless and Quine with different characters, and allowing a jubilant Urquhart to take control of the British monarchy by forcing the King to abdicate in favour of his manageable adolescent son.

154  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy Ian Anderson, who gave the screen Francis Urquhart all the depth of his long experience as a Shakespearean actor, imposed for his participation in the third mini-series the condition that the villain should finally get his come-uppance for fear that he might be typecast, a request which Dobbs confirms (in Davies n.p. online). Assuming, then, some of the cynicism in the BBC’s treatment of Urquhart, in his last novel The Final Cut Dobbs decided to have his villain stage-manage his own demise. Concerned about his mortality, tired of the pressure for him to resign after ten successful years as Prime Minister, and worried that his despicable murder of two young Cypriot fighters in 1956 might taint his legacy, Urquhart secretly entices the boys’ brother to assassinate him while making sure that the ugly truth remains unknown. Nonetheless, the assassination imagined by Dobbs as the villain’s last manipulation of events in his favour was turned into a plot of betrayal by his wife Elizabeth, a character almost negligible in Dobbs’s work but transformed by Davies into a Lady Macbeth for the 1990s. Dobbs accepted the alterations made to his plot but was so incensed by the opening of The Final Cut with the funeral of Margaret Thatcher (twenty years before her actual death in 2013) that he withdrew his name from the credits.3 A full-time author since the mid-1990s, with twenty political novels to his name, Lord Dobbs of Wylye (he was made a life peer by PM David Cameron in 2010) has a long, distinguished political career in the Tory Party, started in 1975 when he was only twenty-seven. This includes being Margaret Thatcher’s advisor when she was still Opposition Leader (1977–1979), an appointment as Government Special Advisor (1981– 1986) once she was in power, and his task as the Conservative Party’s Chief of Staff (1986–1987). After a spell at the top advertising agency in the UK, Saatchi & Saatchi, Dobbs was appointed Party Deputy Chairman (1994–1995) under Thatcher’s successor, John Major. By Dobbs’s own account, Urquhart was directly inspired by Margaret Thatcher, specifically by an incident in 1987 during which she was unfairly abusive. Thatcher ‘could be wonderfully caustic’ (Blundell 193) and Dobbs found himself, despite his loyalty and admiration, on the receiving end of her wrath, ‘caught in the crossfire’ (Dobbs in Davies n.p. online) between Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, his immediate superior and the director of the only moderately successful 1987 electoral campaign. For her, the incident is negligible and so is Dobbs: he occupies just one sentence in her lengthy two-volume memoirs as ‘the future author of lurid tales of political skulduggery’ (Path 441). For Dobbs, in contrast, the ‘huge falling out’ was ‘a turning point’ in his life (in Oxford Union online video). During the holiday taken as therapy ‘for the beating up that I had’ (in Oxford Union), he was provoked by his reading of a poorly written political thriller—rumoured to have been penned by Jeffrey Archer—to claim that he could do better. His wife Amanda challenged him to try his hand and, despite lacking a previous vocation

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  155 as a writer, he took up her gauntlet. On the first day, Dobbs just wrote the initials F.U., thinking of Thatcher; on the second, Francis Urquhart emerged from his traumatized imagination. Urquhart should not be understood, in any case, as a character created simply in revenge against Thatcher. Dobbs has described his House of Cards trilogy as a text ‘about the fragility of power’, dealing mainly with the ‘extraordinary fact’ that ‘almost every British Prime Minister for the last hundred years has been chopped, hacked, stabbed, and dragged out of office, leaving their finger nails in the carpet on Number 10’ (in Fletcher Forum 118). Dobbs feels fascination for the process by which these power-hungry persons embark on a career that, even when it is successful, often leads to their final humiliation, as it happened in Thatcher’s case. Most analyses of her time as Prime Minister (1979–1990) conclude that ‘She stayed on too long. (…) Even the most dominant figure declines in power and authority, makes mistakes and faces challenges’ (Riddell 20). The opening scene of the BBC adaptation shows Chief Whip Urquhart putting Thatcher’s photo face down on his desk as she leaves No. 10 Downing Street while he muses ‘nothing lasts forever’; nobody at BBC could anticipate that this episode would be broadcast the very same week she resigned.4 In her memoirs, Thatcher describes with undisguised bitterness how her Party forced her to quit. When she was told by a top-ranking member that she should leave office with dignity, she correctly interpreted the message as an order to resign at once. Thatcher claims that she intended to leave office in two more years—­after John Major matured into a better successor, she notes— and she was certainly irked by this summons to obey Party discipline: I reflected that if the great and good of the Tory Party had had their way, I would never have become Party leader, let alone Prime Minister. Nor had I the slightest interest in appearances nor in the trappings of office. I would fight—and if necessary go down ­fighting—for my beliefs as long as I could. “Dignity” did not come into it. (Downing Street 832, original quotation marks) In fact, dignity does come into it, and this is the conflict that truly interests Dobbs: how Prime Ministers who outstay their welcome and are forced to relinquish immense power struggle to keep their public sense of dignity and, above all, their personal self-esteem. This is the key issue from which Urquhart emerged. Thatcher certainly casts a long shadow over the Urquhart trilogy in many senses, beginning with her unique political style. Dobbs is fascinated and at the same time mystified by extraordinary leadership (which is not quite the same as charismatic leadership): ‘History will tell you that great political readers aren’t one of us. They are uncomfortable, they are driven, they’re obsessed, they are usually not normal, balanced people’

156  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy (in Oxford Society online video). They are, in short, imperfect people prone to self-destruction, yet admirable for that. Dobbs no doubt appreciates Thatcher, for she possessed ‘that drive and that anger, that determination, that obsessiveness that drove her on to achieve things which most of her people could not’ (in Oxford Society), by which he means persons of her same middle-class provincial background. Dobbs is very much aware that the anger came from the limitations which others had tried to impose on Thatcher as a woman (as the passage above quoted corroborates) but he makes no comment on how her style in politics was gendered. Thatcher, of course, is for many a hero from whom important political lessons have been learned but she is more generally seen if not as a downright villain—a view some would support, especially in anti-Tory Scotland—at least as the embodiment of the worst excesses of political and economic liberalism, particularly in her onslaught against the welfare state, her defence of total individualism, and her anti-feminism. Dobbs is not worried by Thatcher’s general disloyalty to women but the question that lies behind Urquhart’s villainous machinations is whether he can outdo Thatcher as a man, also implicitly as a patriarchal villain. Until the appointment of Theresa May as Prime Minister in 2016, Thatcher was the only female PM in British History and one of the very few in the world. The ‘symbolic “wound”’ Thatcherism left ‘in the contemporary imagination’ (Hadley & Ho 2) has inspired a veritable avalanche of studies considering how gender conditioned her leadership. Formally or informally, many have concluded that ‘she seemed to be not so much a “real woman”, but much more of a “male type”’ (Cannadine 61). Others have claimed that, on the contrary, she made the best of a diversity of non-feminist female roles, first to claim power as a homely housewife (Ponton) and later, once in power, to control the all-male circle of power. Among other roles, Berlinksi maintains, she presented herself as the Great Diva, the Mother of the Nation, the Coy Flirt, the Screeching Harridan, Boudicea the Warrior Queen and the Matron.5 Others have added the handbag wielding schoolmistress to this list. ‘No wonder’, Hennesy writes, ‘some ministers were actually physically sick before going to meetings with a piece of business likely to be on the receiving end of the most famous handbag in world political history’ (401). Dobbs recalls that ‘Several publishers had approached me to write some memoirs, Working with the Swinging Handbag, that sort of thing, but I would never do a “kiss and tell” book’ (in Davies n.p. online). Of course, he did, in a way, by writing the Urquhart trilogy. In a most interesting way, Dobbs’s villain fills in a new gap opened up by the gendering of politics caused by Thatcherism: since so much has been written about Thatcher as a woman, shouldn’t masculinity also be considered in depth in the context of politics? Kennedy and McCormack’s edited volume Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain (2007) and

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  157 The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe (Fletcher et al. 2018) point in that direction. As a novelist Dobbs, then, should be credited with pioneering, as I aim to show, this urgent exploration of the close links between politics and patriarchal masculinity. Other issues make Dobbs’s trilogy immensely relevant for the analysis of British patriarchal villainy: Urquhart’s Scottishness,6 which connects him with Macbeth but also with James Bond; how his ageing conditions each phase of his management of power (a key issue also for Scottish villain Big Ger Cafferty, the focus of the following chapter); and his relationship with the younger women who eventually face him. There is, nevertheless, a far more important issue in the Urquhart trilogy: this schemer and rumour monger occupies the top position in the British democratic political system. Urquhart is closely connected to Shakespeare’s Richard III in his ambition to occupy power at any cost and he himself often reads events in relation to Julius Caesar,7 yet these two plays deal with the rule of one man as a tyrant in an undemocratic context—so does Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, also often cited in connection with Urquhart.8 Dobbs, an insider with enormous political acumen, warns us with Urquhart that democracy is extremely vulnerable. Democracy, Dobbs reminds us, is different from tyranny because it allows for the existence of a variety of political parties and of elections which limit mandates. Its apparent fair play can, nonetheless, always be manipulated, as Francis Urquhart showed back in the 1990s (and Hitler in the 1930s), and as we are seeing today in nations as different as Russia and the United States. It is, therefore, most important to constantly monitor the acts of any individuals who might misuse power and defend the role of democracy as an instrument for total political accountability and transparency. Above all, it is essential not to fall into the trap of admiring astute villains like Urquhart, or his equivalents in real-life politics.

House of Cards: The Ghost of the Father The narrative arc that Michael Dobbs imagined for Francis Urquhart in this first novel, House of Cards, concludes with the villain’s suicide when he plunges to his death from the roof garden of London’s Houses of Parliament. His failure to kill in cold blood hero journalist Mattie Storin there, after she faces up to him, forces Urquhart to accept ‘the awful truth of his own cowardice’ (HoC 382). As Mattie leaves, ‘the silence in his head was filled with the ghostly, mocking laughter of his father’ (382), which Urquhart can only suppress with his own death. The dead father’s laughter is specifically elicited by the son’s ultimate inability to secure the position of British Prime Minister, already available to him when his villainous acts are exposed. His appointment

158  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy should have been the culmination of the political career for which Urquhart abandoned his patriarchal duties as his father’s son and heir, hence the spectral laughter that haunts him. A Perthshire native, Urquhart finds himself increasingly alienated from his family when his elder brother Alastair goes missing during WWII, at Dunkirk, and he finds himself expected to take up his duties. As Dobbs eventually clarified in To Play the King, what drives Urquhart south is not only his academic career as a Reader in Economics at Oxford, which fulfils temporarily his need to find others to compete with, but also ‘the financial despair of the Scottish moorlands’ (TPK 34). Urquhart despises his grandfather for having left no provision to face increasing taxation, but he scorns, above all, the father ‘whose painful sentimentality and attachment towards tradition had brought the estate’s finances to their knees’ (TPK 34). He commits, thus, the ultimate patriarchal offence against these two men: ‘amidst much family bitterness’ Urquhart sells the estates, which are no use to him either as a source of income or of political power, and, aged thirty-nine already, he moves to the ‘safer political fields of Westminster and Surrey’ (TPK 39). Understandably resentful, his father severs then all ties with him. Urquhart’s relatively late start ends an academic life which he has come to despise but which somehow trains him adequately for the squabbling he later parries. The fierce thrashing by the Oxford dons of a junior Treasury Minister opens his eyes to the prospects that Westminster may offer, despite the possible pitfalls, and armed with his impressive academic credentials Urquhart embarks on a political career in the Party (never openly named the Conservative or the Tory Party). What this patriarchal traitor to his father’s Scottish roots finds, however, is that British politics is a game of constant betrayal, a house of cards always on the brink of toppling down. By the time we meet Urquhart, already aged sixty-one, his career of two decades is successful but stagnant, as he knows only too well. Appointed Chief Whip after occupying minor positions in the political ladder—as backbencher and in lower-level (or junior) ministerial jobs, combined with diverse City directorships—Urquhart enjoys a key position in the Government, with ‘splendid offices’ (HoC 14) at 12 Downing Street, next door to the Prime Minister. This short distance and his right to attend Cabinet meetings alert Urquhart, nonetheless, to his many limitations. He does wield a notable amount of power but his job as Party’s disciplinarian is ‘a faceless task’ (14), even among his peers, which, besides, lacks public projection. Urquhart, who as Whip needs to be constantly aware of what each MP under his vigilance is doing, eventually realizes that ‘information is power’ (14). Not enough, as he finds to his chagrin, to finally procure him with a coveted position as Secretary of State in the latest reshuffle of youthful PM Henry Collingridge’s Cabinet. Age is also a concern, for he is already past sixty.

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  159 Urquhart tells a rude, ageist journalist who asks an impertinent question about his retirement that he still has much to accomplish, though he does worry privately that he is not ‘ageing with the elegance or the authority’ (15) he had expected to achieve; he is also anxious that younger, inferior men are advancing ahead of him. The missed Cabinet appointment would have given Urquhart a better public profile and silenced ‘his father’s scorn with greater prominence than the old man could ever have dreamed of’ (16). He still has time to leave his imprint and satisfy his ambitions, but Urquhart is also aware that this needs to be soon. Francis Urquhart is not, then, a villain from the start of his adult life, unless disappointing his father is seen as an act of villainy. What brings out his full villainous potential is Collingridge’s decision to by-pass him for promotion—the Prime Minister chooses to have Urquhart stay on as Chief Whip—at a time when Urquhart is beginning to feel the pull of his own mortality. His humiliation can find no overt expression, for rejecting his renewal in his post as Whip means political suicide. Feeling ‘a strong sense of injustice and ingratitude, which adds to the ideological differences between him and a man, Collingridge, who comes from the social wing of the party, he decides to precipitate the fall of the Government leader’ (Smith 123, my translation). Urquhart starts then an implacable conquest of power on the Machiavellian principle9 that the realms of politics and morality ‘have an autonomy and logic of their own, while at the same time they are possible without each other’ (Donskis 9). A singularity of this onslaught on power is that Urquhart has always concealed his high ambitions. The authorial voice in the text points out that ‘public loyalty is rarely more than a necessary cover for private ambition’ (HoC 137), and this is a façade that Urquhart maintains for a long time, while he ruthlessly forges his path towards being appointed Prime Minister. The onset of Urquhart’s plans is, nonetheless, accidental. Collingridge— Thatcher’s hastily appointed (fictional) successor after her forced ­resignation—wins a fourth consecutive electoral Tory victory and, although the majority is quite narrow and he is a rather bland leader, his position seems safe. Mattie tells her editor at the Daily Telegraph that, after Thatcher, the Party needed ‘Something less abrasive, less domineering, they’d had enough of trial by ordeal and being shown up by a woman’ (21). State Secretary Woolton, however, voices his (gendered) concern that, unlike Thatcher, Collingridge lacks a clear vision, and thus ‘when he tries to be tough it simply comes across as arrogance and harshness. He tries to mimic Margaret but he hasn’t got the balls’ (137). Trying to prove her own mettle as a young political correspondent (she’s only twenty-eight), Mattie approaches Urquhart for his own assessment of the new Prime Minister and charmed by her bluntness, he instantly decides to use her in an improvised smear campaign, presenting the actually stable Cabinet as full of infighting. Unwittingly, she becomes his

160  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy accomplice and the rumours started by her article snowball into real competition for the Party’s leadership, as Urquhart wishes. Urquhart’s grievance against Collingridge is not only motivated by the PM’s rejection of the Chief Whip’s ideas for the new Cabinet and his own personal disappointment but also by social class reasons, as Smith hints in the above quotation. He feels uncomfortable in the presence of Collingridge, ‘a grammar school product who in social terms would have had trouble gaining membership of his club’ (HoC 43). In part for this classist reason, Urquhart decides to undermine the PM’s career by manipulating the public image of Collingridge’s alcoholic brother, Charlie, with the help of Roger O’Neill, the Party’s Publicity Director. O’Neill, a cocaine addict that Urquhart has in his grip, is an unwilling accomplice and although he obeys all of Urquhart’s orders—including pimping his secretary Penny to a rival in the leadership contest for blackmailing purposes—he grows progressively afraid of the consequences of this unwanted alliance. When he sees that the knighthood he covets as a reward for falsely exposing Charlie as a fraudster, and thus bring down the Prime Minister, will not materialize, O’Neill becomes a liability. His murder with poisoned cocaine is Urquhart’s most brutal act of villainy in House of Cards and, ultimately, the crime for which he is unmasked. The hero function is, at any rate, eventually shared between Mattie and her employer Benjamin Landless, conceivably an even greater patriarchal villain than Urquhart. Mattie’s narrative arc is clearly feminist: she is the ambitious career woman who will not be stopped by the patriarchal men who try to hinder her, including Landless. She starts, as I have noted, the rumours fuelled by Urquhart, candidly believing that they are true, but as her investigation of what appears to be a secret plot to depose Collingridge advances, she sees her work suppressed by Landless through his puppet Greville Preston, her editor at the Daily Telegraph. Mattie and Landless ignore the grim details of Urquhart’s plotting but she is also initially unaware that Landless is secretly supporting Urquhart’s candidacy in exchange for a favourable business deal, once he is appointed Prime Minister. This is then a case of a female hero being forced to sign an alliance with a villain-hero. Read today, House of Cards is a reminder that the presence of women in the circles of political power and of the media is quite recent. Mattie has somehow inherited from her maternal Norwegian grandfather, who escaped Nazi occupation to join the Royal Air Force, the ‘strength’ required ‘to survive in the masculine world of politics and newspapers’ (HoC 22). She is the only woman in her circle, and Dobbs is straightforward about the constant sexual harassment which she faces. Despite this, she always tries to be herself, avoiding pointless masculinisation to be accepted as one of the boys while never playing ‘the simpering lovely lady to satisfy the chauvinistic demands of her male colleagues’ (22). Mattie does not use sex to advance her career but regards the sexual

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  161 politics of private life as useful ‘training for politics’ with ‘the unending protestations of loyalty and devotion’ barely covering ‘the tiny deceits which grew and left behind only reproach and eventually bitterness’ (8). Far from subjecting Mattie, as Andrew Davies does in the BBC mini-­series, to the abjection of being Urquhart’s mistress and eventual murder victim, Dobbs makes her a central hero. He even gives her a male supporting partner, her boyfriend and fellow journalist John Krajewski, who remains loyal even when her career is jeopardized. Men do not fare much better than Mattie when navigating the patriarchal politics and media. The Party Chairman, Lord Williams, warns his protégé Michael Samuels, a strong contender in the leadership race, that ‘Many more politicians have been betrayed by their colleagues than have ever been destroyed by their opponents’ (40). Urquhart uses his position as Chief Whip to destroy each one of his opponents by linking them with scandalous revelations published in Landless’s newspapers. The portrait Dobbs paints of male politicians is simply deplorable: Urquhart confides to O’Neill that he has dealt ‘with cases of wife beating, adultery, fraud, mental illness’, even incest (68). Having kept the Party’s public reputation spotless so far, he exploits the men’s foibles in his favour in the contest for power. The media embodied by Landless, with a new profit-oriented philosophy of journalism and a policy of supporting whatever party is in power, uses scandal hypocritically and interestedly, not at all to benefit the community. Urquhart seals this clandestine collaboration because he can thus ‘slither around under the public radar rather than parading out in front of it’ (Tease n.p. online). Urquhart, however, misses a fundamental point: by leaking crucial information to Landless through Mattie he also puts himself progressively in the media mogul’s hands. Once Collingridge resigns, following a relentless campaign in and outside the Party and the House of Commons supported by Landless, Urquhart feels exhilarated to have obliterated the man at the top of the political hierarchy. He does not realize yet that, having acknowledged to Landless his interest in becoming the next Prime Minister, he has relinquished the control over his career to a powerful enemy. Whereas in the BBC mini-series Urquhart’s wife ­Elizabeth is his main supporter, Dobbs’s Miranda is here a poorly realized character. Landless, therefore, is the first person to ever hear what ­Urquhart truly wants because before this man ‘who wore his naked ambition on his sleeve, he felt no embarrassment in the confession’ (212). When Landless and Urquhart celebrate with their shared villainous laughter Samuel’s downfall—the last rival to withdraw from the race to become Prime Minister—it is hard to say who is the bigger villain. This ambiguity is also highlighted by each man’s ultimate goal. Landless, a pragmatic cockney with a rags-to-riches background, wants to control the media business in Britain, for which he needs the Government to abolish anti-monopoly legislation. Urquhart dreams instead

162  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy of fulfilling a personal aspiration and cares little for material reward. ­ ontemplating the portraits of previous Prime Ministers, he expresses C his admiration for Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, great leaders but also unrestrained men who need not obey political correctness simply because it did not exist in their time. Urquhart deplores the ‘blanket of mediocrity’ cast by the media ‘over most holders of the office since the war, stifling individualism and those with real inspiration’ (48). He must acknowledge, with strained pragmatism, that ‘the grand old days when politicians made their own rules’ (48) are gone for good. Dobbs connects power and (literal) addiction through Roger O’Neill’s murder. Mattie’s boss rejects the evidence proving that Charlie Collingridge was framed and, so, that his brother the PM resigned needlessly, arguing that ‘Things stranger than fiction have happened in politics’ because ‘Power is a drug, like a candle to a moth’ (246). Mattie and her partner John eventually understand that Urquhart’s self-presentation as an unassuming man and a reluctant candidate to the Party leadership hides a ruthless determination to fulfil his craving for power.10 Urquhart himself hesitates for a moment before cutting O’Neill’s cocaine with rat poison but he quickly steels himself to the task, justifying his crime on the grounds that ‘all politicians played with other men’s lives, and all lives had a price’ (342). Mattie, however, realizes that, despite his own ambition, Landless, though a ‘rogue’, will not risk his hard-won reputation as a ‘working class patriot’ (375) to hand Downing Street over to ‘a murderer’ (375). The appeal to these basic values and her call to play the role of hero works and, so, the strange alliance between the patriarchal mogul and the feminist career woman is sealed. Landless withdraws his bid for the newspaper group which he wants to acquire, and Mattie confronts Urquhart with the proofs she has of his many crimes. The villain gets his come-uppance and the female hero is rewarded with the expectation of a happy personal and professional life—at least, for as long as Landless allows it. One last observation concerning Dobbs’s House of Cards: Urquhart has no political programme beyond what we may assume, given his affiliation to the Party that put Thatcher in power. Neither Collingridge nor any of the other politicians fighting for leadership mention any specific policies that they wish to implement. Urquhart’s main motivation is, as I have argued, his private need to stop hearing the ghostly laughter of his father.11 This, of course, is not a sound which the old man ever actually made but Urquhart’s own inner voice, the patriarchal conscience making a mockery of his villainous efforts to succeed. Replacing the classic laughter of the villain gloating over his success, the father’s laughter which only he can hear tells Urquhart that he has failed as a man and even as a villain. This first novel concludes that Urquhart has no right to take criminal shortcuts to access the most powerful position in Britain, hence his catastrophic ending. This is perhaps a romantic, naïve vision

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  163 but it is still a respectable, valuable one, particularly because it endorses Mattie’s feminism as an important instrument to undo patriarchal villainy. She tells Landless that there is a line that can never be crossed: villains guilty of causing the deaths of many human beings may have been appointed to high office even in democracies but a self-respecting democracy cannot have a known murderer appointed Prime Minister. Readers might not sympathize with the patriarchal values represented by the ghostly laughter of the dead father, but Urquhart’s demise should certainly be cause for celebration.

To Play the King: The Meaning of Manhood To Play the King also deals with a political crisis connected with the figure of the father, here embodied by the monarch. The confrontation between Urquhart, the new Prime Minister, and the recently crowned King—a fictional alternative to Queen Elizabeth’s heir Prince Charles— is in appearance caused by the monarch’s unconventional demand to express publicly his views on the deep social divisions in Britain. This breaks the constitutional pact by which the King occupies a neutral political position as symbolic head of the British State (and of the Anglican Church) while the Government rules in practice. Beyond this political dispute, King and PM diverge most profoundly in their understanding of what a man should be. Sally Quine, Urquhart’s American mistress, has an intuition that his antipathy for the King must be rooted in something personal. He initially replies to her enquiries about their disagreements that the King is an interfering, ‘pathetic idealist’ (TPK 217). Her insistence, though, forces Urquhart to grant that he dislikes the King so much because the monarch is obsessed by fatherhood. Sally is traumatized by having given birth to a stillborn boy as a result of her ex-husband’s physical abuse, and Urquhart wounds her deeply by asserting that having children is an egotistical undertaking, just a ‘pathetic attempt to grab at immortality’ (217) and not, as she argues, an act of love. The ensuing quarrel ends with a mutual physical assault (they slap each other hard) until Urquhart reveals that the source of his bitterness is that he cannot have children. The King’s pleasure in being a father has demolished Urquhart’s painful efforts to persuade himself that having no offspring is of no consequence, and he feels ‘as if I am stripped naked and humiliated simply by being in his presence’ (218). The King—a victim in the BBC adaptation but one of Dobbs’s ­heroes— expresses more openly than any other character in the whole trilogy his abhorrence of Urquhart, even face to face in their conversations: ‘I despise you and all that you stand for. The ruthless, relentless, utterly soulless way you pursue your ends. I feel bound to do everything within my power to stop you’ (308). It is not true, nevertheless, that the monarch

164  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy taunts the PM on purpose whenever he praises his own children, for he ignores that Urquhart is not a father himself. However, it is certainly correct to see the King’s confrontation with his PM as a battle closely connected with each man’s understanding of masculinity and, more specifically, of their own manhood. In this novel the King, divorced from an unnamed woman (not intended to be real-life Lady Diana Spencer),12 is presented as a father who sincerely cares for his only son and heir, as the letters which he mails him to Eton, where the teen boy is being educated, prove. These letters reveal the monarch’s obsession to prove himself as a man even if this requires his abdication. When Urquhart censors a speech with which the King intends to call attention to the divisions in society, he writes to the prince that ‘They are trying to make me a eunuch and force me to deny my own manhood. (…) But I cannot be a Monarch without also retaining my self-respect as a man—as you will find when your time comes’ (214). Mycroft, the press aide and spokesman, feels dismay at the King’s ‘emasculated draft’ (116), censored by the PM himself. In the King’s subsequent quarrel with Urquhart, masculinity is inextricably linked to politics. The monarch refuses to ‘repudiate my own beliefs. It would be offensive to me not only as a Monarch, but as a man’. Urquhart curtly reminds him that he has ‘no right to personal beliefs’ for on ‘politically sensitive matters’ he is not ‘a man, you are a constitutional tool…’ (129, original ellipsis). Urquhart’s wife Elizabeth is convinced that he can be a new Oliver Cromwell, but his values are not republican, and, unlike what happens in the BBC mini-series, a possible regency is not at all appealing to him. Urquhart simply wishes to gag the King so that his own blatantly classist policies appear to have his endorsement. The monarch, however, sees Urquhart’s villainy expressed not only in his indifference towards the manifest inequalities in the lives of the British citizens but also in the PM’s contempt for his rights as a man of principle. In another letter to his son, the King writes that if he is deprived of the chance to contribute to the nation’s future, ‘either as man or Monarch, then I have no manhood, no soul, nothing’ (142). When he decides to defy Urquhart, the King gleefully announces that it is ‘time to play the man!’ (242); likewise, when he finds that he is not free to do as he wishes, he complains that ‘They will no more let a King be a man than they would any man be King’ (292). Ultimately, the monarch sees his combat with villainy not simply as a fight to undo the threat that the PM embodies but as a challenge to measure up both as King and man. His decision to abdicate is a victory over patriarchal villainy because it is freely taken by a man whose masculinity is finally liberated from patriarchal duty. His more patient son will be a much better King and the Crown will be saved with him as Regent. ‘It’s the best thing for me, the man’, he tells Urquhart. ‘And it is also the best damned way I can devise of destroying you and everything you stand for’ (315).

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  165 The King’s timely abdication is, in any case, just one factor behind Urquhart’s punishment. The other is the alliance between Benjamin Landless and the ambitious Sally Quine, a businesswoman with a high reputation as an efficient opinion pollster. Urquhart makes a powerful enemy when he backs out of the deal to grant Landless permission to buy United Newspapers, fearing that Landless might use his media power to control him. Humiliated and angry, Landless offers Quine a partnership in his intended ‘civil war’ (26) against Urquhart. Landless’s proposal does not include sex but the pragmatic Sally, as Urquhart eventually learns, conducts an affair with the new PM while she is also Landless’s mistress. This sub-plot is not, however, just a way of showing how she uses sex to her advantage but also to defeat the villain as a man. When Urquhart mocks the alliance between Landless and the King, the former humiliates him doubly. He shows Urquhart photos of his wife Elizabeth in bed with her Italian opera singer lover and he announces Sally’s pregnancy: ‘Seems you’re not man enough for anything’ (313). Among the reasons Landless gives Urquhart to explain why he supports the King, he mentions that the monarch ‘welcomed me, just as I am, Big Bad Benjamin from Bethnal Green, without looking down his nose’ (313), whereas he has felt always snubbed by the PM’s patrician wife. Elizabeth, a member of an illustrious family with Scottish royal ancestry, is not personally wealthy but she is remarkably snobbish. For her, the current aristocrats and the Royal Family are nothing but ‘interlopers’ (43). Although Elizabeth, her husband’s junior for about fifteen years, is still very attractive and the couple do love each other deeply, the Urquharts lead separate sex lives (as Landless discovers to his benefit). She controls, nonetheless, not only her husband’s social life (for his personality is that of a loner) but also his affairs. When she forces him to end the relationship with Sally, feeling a sudden possessiveness inspired by Urquhart’s successful scheming, he complies. He and his wife, Urquhart tells Sally, ‘understand each other. We don’t cheat on that understanding’ (299). Elizabeth sees her husband as a means to secure her own social standing and respectability, values for which she has ‘shared in all the sacrifices and the hard work’ (244), but she is for Urquhart far more important: their relationship ‘had made him a man’ (300). Still, Sally’s role as mistress and main political accomplice shows that, arguably, the constantly absent Elizabeth is not fulfilling a crucial part of her function in the partnership. The sexual intimacy with Elizabeth has also been instrumental for Urquhart to overcome a profound sense of sexual inadequacy, which is easy enough to understand without recurring to Freudian psychoanalysis and its Oedipus complex. His mother’s inability to cope with the grief caused by the death of her elder son Alastair (killed, as noted, in Dunkirk) damages little Francis, who can never compete with the ghost of his heroic lost brother. He sought as a young boy ‘comfort and

166  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy warmth’ from his bed-ridden mother, only to be offered tears which elicit a ‘feeling of rejection, of being somehow inadequate’; as an adult, ‘he could never completely expel from his mind his mother’s look of misery and incomprehension, which seemed to haunt any bedroom he entered’ (98). Whereas in House of Cards the father’s laughter haunts Urquhart’s climb to power, in To Play the King the mother’s emotional rejection unmans the son, at least until Elizabeth welcomes him to her bed. Before her and once they are married, Urquhart has other lovers but ‘never in bed’ (98). The affair with Sally is carried out in the PM’s office. Urquhart is thrilled because the constant danger of discovery ‘made him feel he was conquering not only her but, through her, the entire world’ (199). Urquhart also feels exhilarated by his appointment as one of the ‘many improbable Prime Ministers’ (42) of Britain, all great leaders: young Pitt, Jewish Disraeli, adulterer Lloyd George, the cuckolded Macmillan, even the ‘unrepentantly ruthless’ Thatcher (42). John Powell, PM Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff (1997–2007), explains that actually political power is not located in Downing Street but is ‘instead widely diffused in the British elite, not just in Government but outside it as well. The only way a Prime Minister can govern is by persuading that elite, by building coalitions of support and by carrying his colleagues with him’ (10). Urquhart, in contrast, makes no effort ‘to reconcile the politics of support and the politics of power’, a strategy which is the ‘essence of statecraft’ (Bale 431). Just as Thatcher did, he learns ‘to regard government as a personal conspiracy’ against him (Jenkins 184), which, also like her, he counteracts with more conspiracy. This attitude emerges because ‘those who pursue power for its own sake’ see ‘their beliefs become the basis for all beliefs; they are the centre of the world over which power gives them control’ (Arnold 11). Dobbs describes this pattern through Sally Quine’s musings, which foretell the end of Urquhart’s career. Eventually, she thinks, he will ‘recognize no rules other than his own, and even as he reached the height of his powers he would begin the downward slide to defeat’ (199). All men in positions of power, she reflects, go through the same process: ‘Vision becomes stale repetition. Not Urquhart, not yet, but sometime’ (199). Dobbs leads his villain to the humiliation of having to resign as PM mainly to avoid the scandal of Elizabeth’s sexual misbehaviour (for which, anyway, he does not blame her). Since, however, the BBC miniseries ended in a very different note, with Urquhart eliminating his potential blackmailers and forcing the King to abdicate, Dobbs took his  villain’s story into a new phase. For that, he seems to have taken as his main inspiration Sally’s musings, transforming the discourse on manhood and sexuality that dominates To Play the King into a reflection into how the villain faces the end of his power, as younger patriarchal men claim it for themselves.

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  167

The Final Cut: Securing a Place in History The title of the final novel in Francis Urquhart’s trilogy is inspired by the PM’s reading of Thatcher’s The Downing Street Years (the second volume of her memoirs) and of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. ‘Another great assassination’, Urquhart muses to himself in reference to the Roman dictator. ‘Yet how much kinder they were to him than to her (…), ending great Caesar’s misery with a single blow, a final cut. Not lingering’ (FC 461). This third novel narrates Urquhart’s plotting to avoid Thatcher’s fate: being forced out of office by the betrayal of her own Cabinet and living long years seeing others in her former position as PM. Urquhart chooses, as noted, to provoke his own assassination and, therefore, stay in control over his life to the last moment. He would ‘depart’, the PM vows to himself, ‘with so much clamour that it would echo through the ages. Francis Urquhart would be master of his own fate’ (71). Forced to improvise the characterization of his villain depending on the evolution of the BBC mini-series, Dobbs plays here with Urquhart’s date of birth. He is aged sixty-one to sixty-two in the two previous novels, but the author supposes in The Final Cut (set in 1999) that Urquhart, a successful Prime Minister already for one decade, is only sixty-five, not seventy-three as he should be. In House of Cards, we read that Urquhart, presumably born in 1927, was ‘too young for Hitler, too busy at university for Korea, too late for Suez’ (333). The plot in The Final Cut, though, depends on his being twenty-two (thus born in 1934) when he murdered two young boys in Cyprus, in 1956. The dates are by no means trivial since much is made of Urquhart’s sixty-fifth birthday: this is not only the habitual retirement age but also the age at which Thatcher was forced to relinquish Party leadership and her position as PM. When on that date Urquhart looks at the mirror, a patriarchal ghost resurfaces. He feels thirty inside, but the face, ‘sagged, grown blemished, wasted of colour like a winter sky just as the sun slips away’ (103) tells otherwise. So do other traits: ‘The eyes were now more bruised than blue, the bones of the skull seemed in places to be forcing their way through the thinning flesh. They were the features of his father. The battle he could never win’ (103, my italics). Margaret Thatcher maintained her political activity for fifteen years after resigning; she retired in 2005, aged eighty, when her illness (dementia) was far advanced. There was for her, then, a long life after she ceased being the British PM. This is a fate that Urquhart cannot accept. When the last member of his first Cabinet dies in a car crash, Urquhart worries that the media will use this death to demand the political regeneration which others in the Party are calling for. Elizabeth is at a loss to understand what ails her husband, ‘the most successful Prime Minister this country has ever had’ (63). She reminds Urquhart of his impressive record as the winner of most elections ever; he is also

168  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy about to surpass Thatcher’s own ‘record of time in office. Your place in the history books in assured’ (63), she notes. The problem, Urquhart clarifies, is that he is depressed by the impression that he is ‘already history. All yesterday, no longer today. No tomorrow’ (63). Most importantly, he cannot see himself ‘being replaced. Ever’ (68). Whenever he questions what exactly he has achieved, Urquhart falls into black moods and despondency, frustrated that his own prominence is the very reason why those who surround him feel that he must go. Elizabeth, always the more pragmatic member of the couple, is satisfied with their achievements and looks forward to the next phase, to be completed by a memorial Urquhart Library and the Urquhart Chair of International Studies at Oxford. These goals mean, though, little to Urquhart, who regrets most deeply at this point their childlessness. Dobbs’s plot, therefore, brings together in The Final Cut the solution to the two main problems that concern Urquhart: how to be remembered as a great leader instead of as the villain he is, and how to avoid forced retirement. This is done by connecting the PM’s main rival, Foreign Secretary Tom Makepeace, with Urquhart’s eventual assassin, Cypriot migrant Evanghelos Passolides, through the investigations of events that took place in Cyprus many years before. The background is the Cyprus Emergency (1955–1959), an insurrection led by the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) against the British control of the island. EOKA’s efforts, aimed at unification with Greece, would eventually lead to independence in 1960, though the northern part of Cyprus remains illegally occupied by Turkish forces. Contradicting the presentation of Urquhart in House of Cards as a man who has never murdered until he poisons Roger O’Neill, Dobbs supposes that young Second Lieutenant Urquhart, doing mandatory National Service ‘in one of Scotland’s finest regiments following his university deferment’ (FC 22), is ‘not having a good war’ (22). Irritated by the manifest dislike against him shown by the soldiers under his command, men with actual combat experience, Urquhart overreacts when teen brothers George (fifteen-years-old) and Eurypides (only thirteen) accidentally kill Private MacPherson. The boys are on a mission to carry food, guns, detonators, and grenades to their EOKA fighter brother, Evanghelos. Urquhart shoots them and orders then his men to burn them out of the hole where they are hiding. His disgusted soldiers disobey him but, understanding that the trapped, wounded boys face a horrible death, Urquhart’s sergeant throws a grenade to end their suffering. ‘For the first time’, Urquhart muses, ‘he had killed—in the national interest, with all the authority of the common weal, but he knew that many would not accept that as justification’ (31). His report presents the boys as terrorists and argues that they were buried secretly for fear of reprisals. Urquhart never mentions the episode but whenever he is under pressure ‘the brilliant image and the memory of that day

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  169 would return, part-nightmare, part-inspiration. The making of Francis Urquhart’ (33). This war crime becomes a serious problem for the Prime Minister when he steals from Foreign Secretary Makepeace the credit which he is due as the peacemaker that enables the establishment of the new Confederate Republic of Cyprus. The deal, which must still be signed, stirs much hatred against the British and leads ultimately to a rebellion on the Greek side of the island, led by the shady Bishop Teophilos; it also inspires Passolides’s renewed efforts to find the man who killed his brothers. Aided by his daughter Maria, a school mistress, Passolides tries to find out who signed the report, once the classified documents connected with the British occupation are released because of the new climate surrounding the agreement. During her search Maria is eventually directed to contact Makepeace and, once they become lovers, the couple form an alliance that threatens to expose Urquhart’s crimes. Elizabeth opens another dangerous front for Urquhart with her secret deals to attract funding for her post-retirement projects, both from the Cypriot and the Turkish factions on the island. She also leaks top-­ secret information about the finding of large oil reservoirs in Cyprus to Judge Clive Watling—the British delegate in the Le Hague tribunal which must determine the new borders—hoping that he will favour the Turkish side (the Greeks are French allies). Far from upbraiding her and seeking to cover her machinations, when Bishop Teophilos’s rebels kidnap the British High Commissioner and President Nicolaou, Urquhart launches an unwise, misguided military operation. He regards it as his own Falklands War, but the operation soon degenerates into a disaster. The British troops that storm the rebels’ lair are trapped by peaceful demonstrations of Greek patriots and Urquhart’s callous order to use force against them is disobeyed. The fake media revelations that the PM was ready to order the use of chemical and biological weapons against the protesters causes Urquhart’s popularity to plummet. Dobbs’s tightly knit plot leads Urquhart to an apparent dead end. Tom Makepeace, expelled from the Cabinet for his constant disagreements with the PM, starts a new popular movement, still within the Party. His marches bring together many Britons dissatisfied with Urquhart, beginning with the Cypriot community. The media and prominent members of the Cabinet, such as Maxwell Stanbrook, call for his resignation in view of the Cyprus fiasco. The two women closest to Urquhart—his wife Elizabeth and his new Parliamentary Private Secretary Claire Carlssen, another confidant though not his mistress—give him support but are already looking forward to their new lives beyond the PM’s retirement. Elizabeth openly refers to her future widowhood whereas Claire keeps her distance from Urquhart, worried that she might be negatively affected by his fall. Urquhart’s treatment of his Cabinet ministers ‘in the manner of a world-weary headmaster confronted with irresponsible

170  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy schoolboys who deserved a thrashing’ (FC 116) leaves him with no close allies, to the point that the Party simply decides to appoint a new leader. He is, to sum up, outmanoeuvred in all fronts as each villainous step he takes backfires. The progressive realization that Makepeace knows about the Cyprus incident makes Urquhart feel ‘suddenly very old’ (122). His body and mind become fully dominated by the problem of how he is to be judged by History. He even rejects Claire’s perfunctory sexual advances, feeling ‘The gnawing dread that Francis Urquhart the politician had been constructed on the ruins of Francis Urquhart the Man. Incapable of children, denied immortality’ (244). Once he understands that there are no chances of re-election, Urquhart chooses to stop. He cannot live without either Elizabeth or power but he grants to himself that eventually any individual’s life, including love, is bound to be depleted by the many skirmishes in the political battlefield: ‘What survives, for those chosen few, is the name, even after all else has faded away. Immortality’ (457). To secure his own survival into posterity, Urquhart secretly provokes Passolides into assassinating him. He subjects the old man to a brutal campaign of intimidation, including the burning down of his modest restaurant, before sending him the evidence he seeks: the report on his brothers’ deaths, signed with his name. The PM selects next a suitable occasion for his own death. Accompanied by an unsuspecting Elizabeth, he crashes the Trafalgar Square rally organized by Makepeace and ­Maria to celebrate the end of their successful Long March. There he makes a final speech, which begins with his declaring that ‘If ambition is a crime, then I plead guilty’ (471). Urquhart proceeds to explain that, although ambitious for himself, he has been foremost ‘ambitious for our country, to restore it to the ranks of those nations considered great’ (471). Passolides, who has presumably disclosed nothing to his daughter Maria about his intentions, shoots Urquhart and is immediately killed by the PM’s security chief. Broadcast live on TV this looks like a ‘noble death’ (467) caused by Urquhart’s chivalrous attempt to protect Elizabeth from the bullets. He feels ‘no pain. A sense of exhaustion, perhaps. And exhilaration. Triumph. At having cheated them by his end. Cheated them all, except Elizabeth’ (476). Urquhart dies happy in her arms. Passolides’s motivations are never known but Makepeace’s career is anyway destroyed when his relationship with Maria is known, as Urquhart had planned. Technically, Urquhart commits suicide at the end of Dobbs’s original trilogy, which is also his fate in the BBC adaptation.13 There is, though, a crucial difference: in Dobbs’s version, the indirect suicide, with Passolides in the role of unwitting assistant, seals Urquhart’s safe passage into History; in Davies’s version, Urquhart kills himself to avoid the shame and humiliation of his exposure as a villain. Ironically, under pressure

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  171 from the popular trilogy of BBC mini-series Dobbs reversed the message twice repeated in his first two novels: that the villain must be punished. A scorpion encircled by fire, Urquhart sees no option but death yet he avoids public shaming. On the contrary, the late Prime Minister receives public honours for days, winning in this way ‘a final victory’ (FC 477) over his enemies. Those who do know in detail who he really was and what he did remain silent because it is not in their interest to undermine his reputation. Claire manages to secure a position in PM Maxwell Stanbrook’s new Cabinet. Elizabeth, the new Countess Urquhart, inaugurates the memorial library endowed by the Government, presumably enjoying on the side the revenue from her secret dealings. Years later, revisionist historians try but fail ‘to dislodge the memory of Francis Urquhart from the hearts of a grateful nation’ (FC 478). Dobbs offers closure but only partial retribution since Urquhart carries to the grave the secret of his profound villainy. Intriguingly, despite his authorial endorsement of the King’s abhorrence, Dobbs does not dispute Urquhart’s merits as a Prime Minister. As such, Urquhart is seemingly highly valued—as highly, at least, as Margaret Thatcher was valued by her admirers. This raises the issue of which specific feature proves Urquhart’s villainy. The answer might lie in the passage of To Play the King in which Urquhart occupies his Prime Minister office in Downing Street, a moment that impresses him vividly: ‘The telephone beside him could summon statesmen to their fate or command the country to war. It was a power shared with no other man in the realm; indeed, he was no longer just a man but, for better or worse, was now the stuff of history’ (51). By celebrating this kind of achievement, we may miss how terrifying this passage is in its patriarchal bias. Here is a man rejoicing because his power is ‘shared with no other man in the realm’; this is not power to do good and provide for his fellow human beings but power to ‘command the country to war’ if necessary. Democracy sells the fiction that the immense power of Prime Ministers and of republican Presidents is safe in the hands of good men—and occasionally women. Democratically elected leaders can do no major harm, it is supposed, because their mandate is limited and they are controlled by their own party, the opposition, the media, public opinion, and the voting system. Francis Urquhart’s rise shows, nonetheless, that a cunning, ambitious villain can manipulate all of these and accrue a staggering amount of power even in democracy. Urquhart is stopped several times—in the first two novels and in the BBC adaptation—but his planned suicide in Dobbs’s original Final Cut suggests that many men honoured as heroes in the main chapters of world History may be villains who managed to conceal the skeletons in their closets. Francis Urquhart’s determination to achieve his ends and ‘Never repent’ (TPK 42) should be read as a potent warning about how all political systems, including

172  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy democracy, promote a type of potentially villainous, overambitious personality, too addicted to power to be of real service to the nation or the community. The phrase ‘great democratic leader’ is, most likely, an oxymoron.

Notes 1 The academic analysis of Netflix’s House of Cards systematically downplays the role of the BBC adaptation and of Dobbs, who is rarely mentioned (see Jones & Soderlund, Kajtár, or Keller). The volume edited by Edward H. Hackett, House of Cards and Philosophy: Frank Underwood’s Republic has no chapter on these British predecessors, although Underwood is, most obviously, the American version of Francis Urquhart, down to the F.U. initials connecting their names. Aspects appreciated in the Netflix series, such as Underwood’s asides to the camera, are celebrated as original contributions (Kajtár), even though they were introduced by the BBC miniseries as an allusion to Shakespeare’s Richard III. Keller reads the American House of Cards as an update of the medieval English morality play with Underwood as a modern version of the character Vice (see Happé) but he never refers either to Dobbs or to Urquhart. In this way, the chain of textual transmission connecting Vice to Richard III, and he to Urquhart and, hence, to Underwood, is broken. 2 The Chief Whip is the party officer in charge of making sure that Parliament Members vote as the party requires. Tim Renton, the Tory Whip in office at the time when the fictional Urquhart occupies this position, writes in Chief Whip: The Role, History and Black Arts of Parliamentary Whipping, that ‘The subtlety of the author Michael Dobbs’s prototype Chief Whip, Francis Urquhart, saying “you may think that but I could not possibly comment”, is that the respondent is left uncertain whether the Chief Whip has inside knowledge or not. And doubt eats into the resolution of even the hardiest backbencher’ (326). 3 To further complicate textual matters, the popularity of the Netflix series, in which Dobbs collaborates as executive producer, prompted the author to revise his three novels. In the ‘Afterword’ of the new 2015 edition of House of Cards, Dobbs claims that he has respected the spirit of the original, introducing few changes: ‘the narrative is a little tighter, the characters more colourful and the dialogue perhaps crisper’ (376). Other alterations consist of the restructuring of the original long segments into shorter chapters, the addition of aphorisms—presumably by Urquhart himself—before each new chapter, and a brief prologue in the first novel. Oddly, Urquhart’s wife is called Mortima, though she was called Miranda in the original House of Cards novel (but renamed Elizabeth, following the mini-series, in the two later novels). Apart from this detail, To Play the King and The Final Cut remain untouched. In contrast, and for reasons unknown, in the revised House of Cards Dobbs borrows from Andrew Davies’s script for the BBC the murder of hero Mattie Storin by Urquhart. 4 Dobbs carefully disconnects his plot from the actual calendar. Election day in House of Cards (1989) is Thursday 10th June, but that date was a Saturday in 1989 and would only be a Thursday in 1993. This confirms that his trilogy should be read as alternate history, though historical events certainly caught up with the BBC adaptation.

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  173 5 Thatcher is a most paradoxical example of the anti-feminist feminist. Her ‘moral agenda entailed the recreation of an ideology of separate spheres, in which bourgeois men displayed their talents in the freewheeling arena of industry and commerce, and bourgeois women presided over the home as guardians of the nation’s morality’ (Kent 349). Yet, she herself managed to combine family life and her political career thanks to the generous support of her husband Dennis (perhaps the real feminist in the couple). Bea Campbell complains against the confusion generated by Thatcher’s achievement, noting that ‘After her death, Margaret Thatcher was hailed as not only a female role model but, despite her repeated disavowal of feminism as strident and poisonous, also a feminist role model. As if femininity and power automatically generate feminist energy’ (2). 6 Dukore has traced the similarities between this second novel and George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza (1928). In this comedy, King Magnus, an Englishman, obstructs the attempts of his Scottish Prime Minister Joe Proetus to force his abdication. Dobbs, Dukore claims, may have borrowed for To Play the King a scene from Shaw’s play in which the PM, criticised for his un-English behaviour, replies that he is Scottish. 7 Dobbs was ‘totally captivated’ by Julius Caesar when he read the play in secondary school: ‘Here was the most powerful man in the world stabbed, hacked, chopped to death on the steps of his own capital by his best mates. That’s what House of Cards is really, isn’t it? And all politics to a certain extent’ (in Grice n.p. online). 8 Richard III (circa 1593) is usually read as Shakespeare’s disgusted reaction to The Prince (1532), and his villain as the quintessential Machiavellian monster. Both Donkor and Loder maintain, on the contrary, that Shakespeare’s Richard is not a properly Machiavellian prince, since, unlike what the Italian politologist presented as ideal, Richard III’s ‘barbarism’ is ‘gratuitous’ (Donkor n.p. online), and his behaviour inconsistent. Loder even finds that Richard is ‘the perversion of Machiavelli’s ideal prince’ (69) because of his inhumanity. 9 Comparing Francis Urquhart and Frank Underwood, Fallis concludes that the former is ‘a better Machiavellian’ (98). Both men are ‘devious and ruthless’ but Urquhart ‘is much better at the how as well as the why’. Always ‘careful to maintain a reputation for neutrality and integrity’, he has ‘a clear view of what is good for the nation and simply believes that he is the right person to secure it’ (98). His wife Elizabeth notes in The Final Cut that The Prince is one of Urquhart’s favourite books. 10 Dobbs seems to have attentively studied John Major as a secondary inspiration for Urquhart, though the former PM can also be read as the real-life man behind Collingridge. Major, Reitan reports, ‘was relatively unknown to the public’ when he was appointed PM in 1990, but he was well regarded by politicians and those whose business it was to follow politics closely. He was better qualified than most people realized. He was intelligent, articulate, hard-working, and personable. His experience as an [assistant] Whip had taught him how to work with members of the Houses of Commons. (117) This coincides with Urquhart’s profile, though Major, then only forty-­ seven, was one of the youngest PMs ever appointed in Britain; besides, he had already occupied, unlike Urquhart, a string of top-rank Government appointments.

174  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy 11 In the 2015 version, Urquhart’s mother, not his father, stops talking to him after he decides to abandon Scotland for a career in England (partly because he is tired of her neglect after his brother Alastair’s death). Urquhart’s father commits suicide in circumstances unexplained at an unknown time. 12 The separation of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, was announced in Parliament by PM John Major on 9 December 1992, ‘after Dobbs wrote and published the novel, but before Davies wrote the screenplay’ (Dukore 283). Erika Hoffman, the actress who plays ‘The Lady’ in the BBC version, was characterized to suggest a certain similarity with Lady Diana Spencer. 13 In the Netflix series, Frank Underwood is murdered by his most trusted ally, Stamper. Underwood serves for three years (2014–2017) as 46th President of the United States, but he is forced to resign when it becomes apparent that the war which he has declared on terrorist organization ICO is just a ruse to increase his power. His wife Claire, the Vice President, becomes then the first female President of the USA. Underwood’s murder was a plot twist introduced when in November 2017 Netflix suddenly terminated the contract with actor Kevin Spacey, who played Underwood, following allegations of sexual misconduct with underage boys. Dobbs declared himself ‘devastated almost beyond words’ and ‘heartbroken’ (in White n.p. online).

Works Cited Arnold, Bruce. Margaret Thatcher: A Study in Power. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984. Bale, Tim. The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Berlinski, Claire. “There Is No Alternative”: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2008. Blundell, John. Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady. New York: Algora Publishing, 2008. Campbell, Bea. ‘To Be or not to Be a Woman’. The Iron Ladies: Why Do Women Vote Tory? (1987). London: Virago, 2013. 233–247. Cannadine, David. Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. Davies, Hunter. ‘Is He Fibbing? I Can’t Possibly Comment’. The Independent 31 January 1995. www.independent.co.uk/life-style/is-he-fibbing-i-cant-­ possibly-comment-1570603.html Dobbs, Michael. House of Cards. London: Harper, 2015 (revised edition). ———. The Final Cut. London: Harper, 2015 (revised edition). ———. To Play the King. London: Harper, 2015 (revised edition). ———. The Final Cut. London: HarperCollins, 1995. ———. To Play the King. London: HarperCollins, 1993 (1992). ———. House of Cards. London: HarperCollins, 1993 (1989). Donkor, Michael. ‘Richard III and Machiavelli’. British Library 15 March 2016. www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/richard-iii-and-machiavelli Donskis, Leonidas. ‘Niccolò Machiavelli: A Demonized Humanist or a Monster of Modern Politics?’ Power and Imagination: Studies in Politics and Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 1–22. Dukore, Bernard F. ‘Playing Kings, Ultimatums, and Abdications: The Apple Cart and To Play the King’. Comparatist 40 (October 2016): 267–283.

Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy  175 Fallis, Don. ‘Machiavelli Would not Be Impressed’. House of Cards and Philosophy: Frank Underwood’s Republic, Edward H. Hackett (ed.). Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. 92–101. Fletcher Forum. ‘“The Cry Is Going Up”: A Conversation with Lord Michael Dobbs’. The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 42.1 (Winter 2018): 111–122. Grice, Elizabeth. ‘House of Cards: “All Politicians Get Pushed in the End”’. The Telegraph 3 March 2016. www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/03/03/houseof-cards-all-politicians-get-pushed-in-the-end/ Griffin, Ben. ‘Masculinities and Parliamentary Culture in Modern Britain’. The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe, Christopher Fletcher, Sean Brady, Rachel E. Moss & Lucy Riall (eds.). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 403–434. Hackett, Edward H. (ed.). House of Cards and Philosophy: Frank Underwood’s Republic. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. Hadley, Louisa & Elizabeth Ho. ‘Introduction’. Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher and her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture, Louisa Hadley & Elizabeth Ho (eds.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 1–27. Happé, Peter. ‘The Vice and the Folk-Drama’. Folklore 75.3 (Autumn 1964): 161–193. Hennessy, Peter. ‘A Tigress Surrounded by Hamsters: Margaret Thatcher 1979– 1990’. The Prime Minister: The Office and its Holders since 1945. New York: Palgrave, 2001 (2000). 397–436. Jenkins, Peter. Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. Jones, Patrick & Gretchen Soderlund. ‘The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television: Politics, Public Relations, and Journalism in House of Cards and Scandal’. American Quarterly 69.4 (December 2017): 833–856. Kajtár, Lászlo. ‘Rooting for the Villain: Frank Underwood and the Lack of Imaginative Resistance’. House of Cards and Philosophy: Frank Underwood’s Republic, Edward H. Hackett (ed.). Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. 229–236. Keller, James R. ‘The Vice in Vice President: House of Cards and the Morality Tradition’. Journal of Popular Film and Television 43.3 (2015): 111–120. Kennedy, C. & Matthew McCormack (eds.). Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Kent, Susan. Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990. New York: Routledge, 1999. Loder, Conny. ‘Shakespeare’s King Richard III: The Perverted Machiavel’. ‘Divining Thoughts’: Future Directions in Shakespeare Studies, Peter Orford, Michael P. Jones, Lizz Ketterer & Joshua McEvillia (eds.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 69–76. Oxford Union Society. ‘Michael Dobbs: Full Q & A’. YouTube 18 August 2016. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIzYzZBShBI. Video Ponton, Douglas M. ‘The Female Political Leader: A Study of Gender- ­Identity in the Case of Margaret Thatcher’. Journal of Language and Politics 9.2 (2010): 195–218. Powell, Jonathan. The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World. London: The Bodley Head, 2010. Reitan, Earl Aaron. The Thatcher Revolution: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair, 1979–2001. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

176  Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart Trilogy Renton, Tim. Chief Whip: The Role, History and Black Arts of Parliamentary Whipping. London: Politico’s, 2004. Riddell, Peter. The Thatcher Era and its Legacy. London: Blackwell, 1991 (1989). Smith, Paul. ‘“You Might Very Well Think that; I Couldn’t Possibly Comment”: House of Cards de Michael Dobbs’. Parlement[s] 24.2 (2016): 121–129. Tease, Amy Woodbury. ‘Watching House of Cards in the Age of Donald Trump’. Salmagundi 195–196 (Summer-Fall 2017): 243–254. Thatcher, Margaret. The Path to Power. London: HarperCollins, 1995. ———. The Downing Street Years. London: HarperCollins, 1993. White, Peter. ‘Original UK House Of Cards Creator “Devastated” By Cancellation’. Deadline 31 October 2017. https://deadline.com/2017/10/house-of-cards-ukcreator-michael-dobbs-devastated-netflix-cancellation-1202198518/

8 Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss The Constant Struggle to Retain Power

The Rotten Core: The Failure of the Law against Organized Crime Morris Gerald ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty is the main villain in the ongoing series of crime fiction novels by Scottish author Ian Rankin about John Rebus, a former Detective Inspector now retired.1 Cafferty is a powerful gangster, active in the circles of organized crime in Rebus’s city, Edinburgh, and his main antagonist. Big Ger’s presence has been growing in this very popular series—currently in its twenty-first instalment, apart from two short story collections—though it cannot be said to constitute a clear narrative arc aiming at a final crisis. Rebus retired in Exit Music (2007), a novel which ends with his desperate attempt to resuscitate Cafferty— in hospital after a murderous attack which leaves him in a coma—but although this episode offered potential closure for their relationship and for the series, Rankin still has no plans to end either. I have described elsewhere (see Martín ‘Aging’) the dynamics of the peculiar bond connecting Rebus and Cafferty, calling their friendship a ‘fiendship’ on the basis of a scene in which the police officer defines the villain as his friend without the ‘r’ (Resurrection Men 144). Their troubled relationship not only offers a singular view of male enmity but also raises an essential issue: whereas for police officers like Rebus retirement is mandatory, gangsters like Big Ger never surrender. They go on increasing their power until a more ambitious contender claims their throne—which may take long. ‘Many of the individuals identified as mafia dons in the United States are septuagenarians’ (Snyder 182) and so is Cafferty at the current stage of his career. As I will show, Rankin’s series can be read as the story of how Big Ger increases his power every time he neutralizes a rival, while Rebus becomes increasingly disempowered to stop him, especially after he is reduced to the status of a civilian and an old-age pensioner. In Even Dogs in the Wild, Rankin presents Cafferty at an odd moment of doubt, while he hides in his classy Quartermile luxury apartment2 from his enemies. He has never felt ‘carefree’: ‘Always alert to possible attacks, surrounded by those he could not risk trusting, new threats piling on top of old’ (165). He may have conquered ‘the top’ but

178  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss Cafferty wonders, quite exceptionally, ‘Was that any sort of kingdom?’ (165). The reward of career villains like Cafferty is necessarily limited by internal criminal infighting and by the pressure of the law. As the Rebus series unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that the former is a much more important factor than the later. The whole Edinburgh Police force is frequently depicted as an accomplice of organized crime. Its wealthy bosses can easily corrupt individual officers, an offence of which Rebus is time and again (falsely) suspected. The Inspector repeatedly tries to end Cafferty’s villainous career, but not even prison deters the gangster. In jail or free, Big Ger is very much capable of manipulating the quite gullible Rebus to achieve his own ends. Cafferty lives in comfort, even luxury, and is regularly seen ‘at charity functions’ and ‘at various public occasions’ (The Black Book 437), sharing this privileged social space with far more powerful, betterpositioned villains on the side of legality. In Let it Bleed, Rebus chases corrupt Sir Iain Hunter, Permanent (Under)Secretary of the Scottish Office and its most senior civil servant. Hunter, Rankin writes, follows ‘the same ground rules a lot of villains swore by. He was selfish without appearing to be, full or arguments and self-justifications. He espoused the public good but lined his pockets with the public’s money’ (357). Rebus ultimately realizes that punishing this villain means jeopardizing the many jobs that depend on his embezzlement of European Union funds. The ‘ground rules’ are not quite the same for all: upper-class Hunter benefits from his inherited social standing, whereas Big Ger—a product of Scotland’s working-class gangland—never becomes socially respectable, despite his frequent partnerships with Edinburgh’s elite for his shady business deals. This exclusive circle is the same social background to which Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart belongs. He and Cafferty can be read as extreme instances of patriarchal Scottish villainy: the patrician and the plebeian, respectively. Urquhart sheds his family, his personal past, and even his accent to conquer Westminster and a place in British History. Cafferty stays on, finding power on the margins of legality in a rather small geographical area, limited to Edinburgh by the strict territorial divisions in criminal life. Cafferty, thus, embodies Scottishness far more directly than the renegade Scots Urquhart, yet at the same time, he is part of a specific class-based, urban Scottish narrative. Glasgow is the city traditionally identified as the home of Scottish gangster land (see Davies). In fact, Cafferty first appeared in a Glasgow court where Rebus testifies against him. Rankin, however, chose to move Big Ger’s operations to Edinburgh for a mixture of personal, literary, and social reasons. A native of Fife, his life as a student of English at ­Edinburgh University revealed to Rankin a profound duplicity embedded in the very heart of Scottish Literature, mainly in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  179 Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). For Rankin, Cafferty is ‘almost a version of Hogg’s Justified Sinner (…) a kind of devil who is always standing behind Rebus with this seductive voice’ (in Plain 133). Commenting on the two enemies, Sloma notes that ‘Sometimes it is hard to determine which of the two is the Dr. Jekyll and which is the Mr. Hyde’ (66). Edinburgh itself, she argues, is also a main character in the series. Rankin explains that, despite locating his fable about the duplicity of man in London, Stevenson knew well that his native city is ‘very good at hiding its secrets’ (in Severin 74). Irvine Welsh’s notorious Trainspotting (1993) revealed that Edinburgh also possesses a criminal, drug-related underside with deep working-class roots, which most readers had so far identified with Glasgow. In the last three decades, therefore, Rankin has been using crime fiction as a tool to reveal this darker side as well as to delve into the contrast between the ‘beautiful, shimmering surface’ and ‘the typical human failings going on’ (in Severin 73) not only in Edinburgh but in any major city. Rebus and Cafferty cannot be understood, either, without the precedent of William McIlvanney’s fiction, both mainstream novels like The Big Man (1985) and crime fiction like Laidlaw (1977) and The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) (see Pittin-Hédon and Boddy). Rankin’s fiction is also heavily influenced by the American hard-boiled tradition and its endorsement of tough masculinity; this has much in common, in any case, with the admiration for the tough man in Scottish fiction, an admiration of which McIlvanney’s novels are a significant instance. Breu describes American hard-boiled masculinity as ‘a cultural fantasy’ (1), secretly borrowing from ‘the iconography of black masculinity’, perceived as a ‘vitally and violently primitive’ ideal (2). The hard-boiled man of the classic 1940s and 1950s US crime fiction was ‘characterized by a tough, shell-like exterior, a prophylactic toughness that was organized around the rigorous suppression of affect and was mirrored by his detached, laconic utterances and his instrumentalized, seemingly amoral actions’ (1). Both Rebus and Cafferty are undoubtedly based on this model. There is, additionally, a direct nexus joining Rankin to American author Lawrence Block, which Rankin himself has pointed out (see ­W illiams online audio). Block’s Matthew Scuder, an ex-cop turned private detective and the protagonist of another long ongoing series started in 1976, is the close friend of Irish gangster Mick Ballou, the main inspiration for Cafferty. Scudder ‘will not pass moral judgement’ on this villain because he is aware not so much ‘of what morally separates him from people like Mick Ballou but rather of what binds him to them’ (Bertens & D’haen 52). Scudder and Ballou, nonetheless, enjoy their singular friendship because the detective is not targeting professionally the villain. Rebus and Cafferty, in contrast, are placed on opposite sides of the law and although their personalities are uncomfortably close, there is always awareness that they must be adversaries.

180  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss Rankin sees Cafferty as ‘something rotten at the core of society’ (in Harris & Effron 181) and this is how we should read him. He is no mere criminal but a fixture ‘in a culture that enables his success and consistently fails to deliver any meaningful punishment’ (181). It is important to stress that Rankin avoids connecting Cafferty with any form of metaphysical evil. His experience of working on the Channel 4 documentary series Evil Thoughts taught him that it is ‘incredibly difficult to actually get a definition of pure evil’ because there are ‘gradations’; it is, then, safer to speak of acts of evil, though Rankin notes, citing a quote traditionally attributed to Edmund Burke that, even so, ‘sometimes all it takes for evil to actually happen is for someone to do nothing’ (in Björnsson n.p. online). The author does not condemn Cafferty’s constant plotting to achieve his criminal ends—his resilience is even presented as a commendable feature—but he does condemn the inability of law enforcement and legal justice to contain organized crime, in Scotland and everywhere else.

Constructing Big Ger: From Minor Secondary Character to Main Antagonist Cafferty first appears in the Rebus series as a minor secondary character, in one scene of Tooth & Nail (1992), the third novel. Rebus has been helping the London Police to hunt a serial killer and, disgusted by the outcome, he misses Edinburgh, ‘where he could be sure of his villains and his crimes: drug pedlars, protection racketeers, domestic violence, fraud’ (TN 463). Back home, his frustration increases when he realizes that his testimony in the Glasgow court where Big Ger is being judged will be useless, since ‘The case against Cafferty, boss of a thuggish protection and gaming racket, is not airtight’ (479). Rebus’s despair at how ineffective justice is to control villainy is established here as the main keynote in the extensive narrative arc about Big Ger. In The Black Book (1993), Cafferty acquires the status of a formidable, full-blown antagonist. From this novel onward, Big Ger constantly nags Rebus about his hopelessness, using ‘Strawman’ as a nickname for him, a distortion of Stroman, the surname of a pub landlord too scared to testify against Cafferty. Rebus has arrested Big Ger already four times ‘in as many years’ (BB 239) by the beginning of this novel, in which Big Ger is sent again to prison. Understandably obsessed, Rebus aims at ‘a full scale crucifixion’, though this is unlikely to happen because of the ‘flunkies’ willing ‘to go to jail on his behalf’ (239). Cafferty’s career is so exceptionally long because, as Rebus surmises, he is ‘clever’, uses ‘the best lawyers’, and knows how to bribe people ‘maybe even a copper or three’ (454). Former Police officer Alan Wright corroborates that crime can never be eradicated because law enforcement is limited in two main ways: in democracies enforcement agencies must always function ‘under

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  181 the rule of law’ (190) but there is, among police officers, ‘an ever-present danger of corruption and rule-bending of various kinds’ (191). Cafferty’s operations combine legal and illegal ventures, which is why he needs to keep a carefully managed public façade and conceal his violent coercion methods from the law. Big Ger does not see himself as a villain but, in his own words, as a ‘simple businessman who has managed to survive this disease called recession’ (BB 356). Rebus, on the contrary, believes that gangsterism is that disease in its many variations. Cafferty is not a godfather type, nor is he the pseudo-feudal lord of a specific territory. He is, rather, a wily entrepreneur, though the most obvious difference between his approach and that of other mid-scale business owners like him is that he deals in illegal products (drugs, human trafficking and smuggling, money laundering) and uses violence to curb down competition. His approach coincides with the current perception of organized crime as a loose network of similarly minded individuals who share ‘general entrepreneurial habitus’ (Hobbs 166) and are active in the post-­industrial urban milieu of ‘unlicensed capitalism’ (232). To remain competitive, Big Ger needs to keep the legend of his invulnerability alive. His reputation is based not only on the threat of personal violence signified by his bulky, ultra-masculine body—hence the adjective Big in his nickname—but also on the rumours he constantly spreads. These, Rebus notes with bitterness, ‘help make him larger than life’ (BB 279). Cafferty’s intermittent presence means that Rankin characterizes him piecemeal, as the novels appear. In The Black Book, Big Ger explains that he is living in a mansion in posh Duddingston to irritate his middle-­ class, professional neighbours but also because it is near Craigmillar, his birthplace, ‘one of the tougher Edinburgh housing schemes’ (BB 351). Cafferty was also a frequent visitor in a similar estate, Gorgie, where he was minded by an aunt and uncle while his mother worked; his father left one month before he was born (Exit Music 272). Young Ger’s official criminal record begins with his leading a Craigmillar gang ‘to sort out their rivals’ (BB 351) in Niddrie, another notorious housing estate. Teen Cafferty had already caused problems at school ‘for “accidentally” jamming a ballpoint pen into the corner of a fellow pupil’s eye’ (351). Following a classic scenario (see Densley), youthful gang violence gives Big Ger a necessary apprenticeship for his later adult life as a gangster. A traumatized henchman tells Rebus that he has seen Cafferty drown a man with his own bare hands, in the pigsty muck of the Borders farm where many of his enemies disappear: ‘He looked like it was nothing new’ (454), this man recalls, still afraid. Others are fascinated. Upper-class Aengus Gibson, who later commits suicide due to Big Ger’s machinations, writes in his journal that ‘men like Cafferty have import. They are the movers and shakers, the deal-makers. Simply, they get things done. And God, what things!’ (431).

182  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss In Mortal Causes (1994), Rankin gives Cafferty a secret son, Billy Cunningham, the victim of a terrifying execution apparently connected with sectarian nationalist terrorism. Raised in Glasgow’s middle-class Hillhead, the young man never knew that Cafferty was his father since his mother ended the relationship when he was ‘still an infant’ (MC 508). Billy’s mother explains to the Police—Rebus’s superior reports—that Cafferty ‘kept tabs on Billy all the time he was growing up, made sure he didn’t want for anything’ (508). He accepted the separation from Billy because his mother, in Big Ger’s own words, is ‘a good woman, too good for me, always was’ (515). Against what might be supposed of an essentially patriarchal man, Big Ger respects her decision not to inform Billy of his father’s identity because she ‘wasn’t exactly proud of me’ (515). Cafferty—here happily married to Mo, a woman she presents as a positive influence on his life—has no other children. By downplaying fatherhood, Rankin may have wished to emphasize Big Ger’s obsession with reputation. Billy’s murder incenses him to the point that he breaks out of Barlinnie, where he remains imprisoned for two homicides, in order to wreak revenge. This is not done for fatherly reasons, though. As an angry Big Ger tells Rebus, ‘I can’t have people fucking with my family, it’s bad for my reputation’, hence ‘bad for business’ (515, original italics). The convoluted plot reveals that Billy is just collateral damage, a victim of his unwise association with men who used to be Big Ger’s partners but who ignore the young man’s identity. Alan Fowler and Clyde Moncur were part of a scheme to launder Ulster Volunteer Force’s money back in the late 1970s and 1980s3 and they now support anarchist Frankie Bothwell’s pro-independentist Scottish terrorist band Sword and Shield. Billy is executed when he announces his intention to abandon Bothwell’s doomed operation, which employs him as a hacker. Although his death is not at all intended to undermine his father’s reputation, Cafferty feels anyway forced to act against these three men. Their execution is complicated by Rebus’s unexpected presence, which even forces Cafferty to save his foe from the fire he has started to murder his enemies. Weakened by the smoke, Rebus cannot stop Big Ger and he escapes to finish a cold plot of revenge based on patriarchal notions of honour rather than any actual fatherly feelings. Black & Blue (1997), one of the most solid instalments in the series, showcases the many obstacles which Cafferty faces in his constant struggle to upstage his rivals. This novel is also interesting for the contrast which the plot establishes between the serial killer and the patriarchal villain. DI Rebus investigates here copycat killer Johnny Bible, whose crimes are fashioned on the template provided by Bible John, a real-life murderer active in 1960s Glasgow. Following Cafferty’s lead, Rebus contacts one Joseph Toal, known as Uncle Joe, the crime boss in Glasgow’s neighbourhood of Partick and a powerful business rival. In jail again, Cafferty exploits Rebus’s literal cluelessness, asking him to arrest Toal in exchange for his help, though his connection with the Bible

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  183 John case is just tangential. Toal, who leaves in a modest council house and ‘really did look like someone’s uncle’ (B&B 91, original italics), belongs to a different criminal tradition. Realizing that Cafferty is using Rebus, Toal avoids his arrest, mocking his rival: ‘You always liked an audience, that was your problem’ (B&B 87). Cafferty is here only about fifty but Toal’s mockery and his accelerated ageing in prison can be read metaphorically as a first sign that his power is fading. Cafferty’s antics to neutralize Toal run parallel to Bible John’s efforts to hunt down Johnny Bible, whom he dubs ‘the Upstart’. Posing as minor executive Ryan Slocum—Black & Blue’s background is the North Sea oil industry—he even meets Rebus to pick his brain for clues, knowing about the detective’s fascination with Bible John’s murders for decades. Although Rankin never uses Cafferty as a focalizer, all the scenes in which Bible John appears are presented through the serial killer’s point of view. Rankin allows readers in this way to be aware of who he is, while Rebus is kept in the dark and in mortal danger. When the Police eventually raid the home of the younger serial killer (one Martin Davidson), they discover that Bible John has already executed his imitator. These two predators are rivals in a very different way from Cafferty and Toal. Serial killers are disempowered men who use misogynistic violence to vindicate their patriarchal manhood. They are not in control of their murderous urges nor do they understand their own mentality— with the notorious exception of Thomas Harris’s cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a renowned psychiatrist. In contrast, villains like Toal or Cafferty are in complete control of the violence they apply, in person or through their henchmen. Gangsters regard violence as a tool to maintain and, if possible, increase their power within the patriarchal pyramid. Their victims are mostly men in the context of business rivalry. In contrast, serial killers mainly attack women, lashing out in this way against their patriarchal disempowerment in society. For this reason, when in Standing on Another Man’s Grave (2012) Rebus tells Cafferty about a case presumably involving a serial killer of young women, the gangster quickly replies that this was ‘Never my style…’ (35, original ellipsis). Despite the morbid curiosity and the social alarm caused by the figure of the random murderer, the serial killer is a minor glitch in patriarchy originating in personal disempowerment rather than a villainous lust for power. Cafferty’s sociopathic lack of empathy might seem similar to that of the serial killer, but as a villainous crime boss he is a much bigger threat to society.

Holding on to Power: The Middle Stage of Big Ger’s Career Rankin seems to have been inspired by Bible John’s elimination of ‘the Upstart’ for the next novel in which Big Ger Cafferty appears, The Hanging Garden (1998). The plot introduces Newcastle crime boss Joachim

184  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss ‘Jake’ Tarawicz, known as Mr. Pink Eyes for his peculiar physical appearance (caused by a skin condition, akin to leprosy). This Chechen smuggler of drugs, illegal migrants, and stolen art plans to expand his operations to Scotland in partnership with his local protégé, Tommy Telford. This is the young man Cafferty eventually sees as his enemy upstart. Big Ger is still in Barlinnie and, though he is rumoured to control Edinburgh from prison, ‘gangsters, like Nature, abhorred a vacuum’ (HG 47). Telford, a young but experienced gangster4 from Ferguslie Park, a housing estate in Glasgow’s Paisley, is seeking new territory beyond his overcrowded criminal native environment. He poses, thus, a double threat as an invader of Cafferty’s turf and of Rebus’s Edinburgh. Accordingly, Big Ger tries to overcome his temporary powerlessness by persuading Rebus that cocky Telford is a major threat to the stable relationship between Edinburgh’s organized crime and the Police. Rebus reluctantly accepts this argument, fearing that Tarawicz, rather than Telford, might undermine the city’s precarious balance. Displaying undisguised xenophobia and homophobia, Rebus concludes that Telford is still ‘on a learning curve’ (HG 130) under the tutelage of ­monstrouslooking, gay Mr. Pink Eyes. Tommy prepares to join ‘the bigger picture’ of transnational crime: ‘Yardies and Asians, Turks and Chechens, and all the others’ are ‘spokes on a huge wheel which was trundling mercilessly across the world, breaking bones as it went’ (130). Cafferty’s villainy is a minor problem in comparison to these other foreign gangsters ‘preparing to carve up Scotland’ (328). Protecting local patriarchal masculinity, Rebus gives priority to ­Cafferty’s entitlement over the external contenders vying for his position of power. The impulse ‘to challenge depictions of Scottishness at the same time as they are in a process of evolution’ (Bell 59), characteristic of Rankin’s crime fiction, shows nonetheless a palpable anxiety that the nation might lose its coherence under foreign influence. The clandestine defence carried out through the ultra-conservative patriarchal alliance between Rebus and Cafferty is, therefore, justified. This situation corresponds to the national dilemma which Schoene describes: ‘if nationhood and/or masculinity were to yield wholeheartedly to postmodern diversification, how—if at all—might they come to reassemble? The nation and the masculine self have therefore become highly volatile entities, prone to violence and hypersensitive to violation’ (124). In this scheme, Tommy is not only an upstart but a treacherous facilitator of this national violation. Rankin starts exploring through Telford and later upstarts, above all Darryl Christie, how each young villain reproduces a classic pattern of ascension to power based on using new strategies for a changing environment, in a Darwinian style. Rebus taunts Big Ger about Tommy: ‘Maybe he’s just more ambitious than you. Maybe he reminds you of the way you used to be’.

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  185 ‘Are you saying I’ve gone soft?’ ‘I’m saying it’s adapt or die’. (305) Observing Telford with Tarawicz, Rebus notices ‘neither had ever really grown up’ (132). This prolonged adultescence is combined in Telford— as it is later in Christie—with a cool pragmatism, very different from Big Ger’s fiery temper. Telford’s brash decision to torch Cafferty’s business offices and house, declare all his rival’s henchmen fair game, and even try to persuade Rebus to join his side angers Big Ger but also gains his approval, ‘Like there was a touch of respect there, battling the sense of territorial breach’ (258). Telford’s ‘meteoric rise’ (393) ends when, trying to impress Tarawicz with even more daring exploits, he is arrested for trying to steal decommissioned drugs from the Police. Tarawicz is in fact exploiting the younger man’s craving for his appreciation to control the whole drug business in Scotland. He is also secretly responsible for circulating the false rumours that start the open war between Big Ger and Tommy. His own lust for power, though, blinds Tarawicz and he remains unaware of his being just a dispensable pawn in a bigger deal. His efforts ultimately help the Japanese Yakuza to take over Scotland but also his own North of England criminal domain. Rebus uses a disloyal member of Telford’s ­Family—as his gang is known—to have him first arrested and later betrayed to the Yakuza but these are desperate measures that, as he knows, still leave the ‘disease’ unchecked and Big Ger with no rival to run Edinburgh. In Set in Darkness (2000), the case which Rebus investigates requires tracing the genealogy of local Edinburgh gangsterism back to the 1970s as well as examining its links with politics. The murder victim found in a fireplace of Queensberry House—a former hospital about to be attached to the new Scottish Parliament—was killed in that decade. During his investigation, Rebus learns that Cafferty began his career in 1960s Glasgow as ‘muscle for loan sharks’ (361). He moved next to London ‘for a time, post-Krays and Richardson. Made his name and learned his trade’ (361). He returned to Edinburgh as an employee of top boss Bryce Callan, subsequently ‘branching out on his own’ after demonstrating ‘a propensity for not making mistakes’ (361). Callan retired in 1979 (to Spanish Costa del Sol, a favourite spot with British gangsters) and ‘the upstart Morris Gerald Cafferty’ (361, my italics) took his place. Callan, still active and on Big Ger’s payroll through a subsidy (or blackmail) scheme, is a ‘mythical’ (158) figure with no criminal record since he has never been arrested. The new upstart in Set in Darkness is the son of Callan’s sister, Barry Hutton, a property developer. Hutton intends to make the most of the real estate boom expected from the new post-Devolution phase in ­Scottish History, with the support of Archie Ure, a corrupt member of Edinburgh’s Town Council and a former associate of his uncle. Callan had

186  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss used legal building companies as a front to buy Old Town land before the controversial 1979 referendum for Devolution, 5 assuming, like many other Scots, that it would result in a positive vote. Despite the ensuing fiasco, Callan held on to the properties until the much anticipated boom finally happened, once the second referendum was won in 1997.6 The building of the new Scottish Parliament—started in 1999, when the first elections were held, and completed in 2004—offers new business opportunities which Hutton is ready to take, particularly with Cafferty in prison. Barry’s plans collapse, however, when the gangster cheats his way to freedom by pretending that he has terminal cancer.7 Once freed on compassionate grounds, Big Ger begins a new career as a property developer, with plans to open a leisure centre in Leith—the neighbourhood where Welsh set Trainspotting, by then newly gentrified. Cafferty proposes a partnership to Barry, but he feels snubbed by the younger man’s tepid reaction. Hutton appears to be a respectable businessman and Rebus hints that an association with Big Ger might not suit him. Cafferty attributes their differences to an unbridgeable generational gap, still ignoring that Barry is in fact a gangster. His style is, however, quite different: Hutton is far more capable than his uncle and Big Ger of maintaining a respectable legal façade and of curbing down his own violent instincts, using political corruption as his main tool. ‘All we need is less red tape’ (269) is his main motto. Once they understand what young Barry is up to, though, the two older villains sign a pact to eliminate him. Callan is concerned that Barry’s shenanigans— including a murder committed by his henchman—might affect his own reputation, whereas Big Ger is pleased to renew the partnership with his former boss and to remove an important business rival. Cafferty himself stabs Hutton to death, presumably burying his body near the Parliament under construction. In this way, he puts himself again ‘in charge of his Edinburgh’ (465 original italics). Realizing that his foe can never be defeated, when Cafferty shows his excitement about how the oncoming election might be the first step on the road towards separation from the United Kingdom a despondent Rebus replies ‘Plenty of rogues in Scotland (…) I can’t see how independence would mean less of them’ (333).8 Big Ger’s narrative arc continues in Resurrection Men (2002) with the sub-plot about the end of the relationship with his second in command, Jeffries. The man whom Rebus nicknames ‘the Weasel’ because of his funny looks runs with loyalty and dedication Cafferty’s many business concerns while his boss remains in Barlinnie. This devotion is tested when Jeffries’s son Aly starts dealing a variety of drugs on his own ­initiative, without his father’s knowledge. Rebus’s superiors assume that Jeffries might be willing to testify against Big Ger to protect Aly, but Rebus is not so certain. He only changes his opinion after learning that Aly’s mother died when the boy was only twelve, and he became then his father’s main companion. Later, Jeffries reveals that Aly ignores his

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  187 connection with Big Ger, a strange omission implying that ‘the Weasel’ is possibly ashamed of being Cafferty’s man. Big Ger’s lieutenant is doomed whatever he decides, for he must betray either his son or his boss, and Rebus finds himself sympathizing. Cafferty’s henchman, ‘a piece of low-life’, is transformed in his view into ‘the father, the human being’ (RM 60). Jeffries finally decides to report Aly, hoping that his son will be safe in prison, but realizes too late that Cafferty can also reach him there. He tries then to have Big Ger framed for a heist they are planning together. Cafferty, however, coolly eliminates Jeffries as soon as he is told about Aly’s activities. He stubbornly claims that Aly could not have become a drug dealer without his father’s knowledge and convinces himself as well that Jeffries was ready ‘to make a move on me. Then he got cold feet, shopped Aly…’ (469, original ellipsis). These distortions of the truth are a consequence of the same paranoia which prevents Cafferty from confessing to Jeffries, the only man he supposedly trusts, that he never really suffered from cancer. The false impressions and omissions are further evidence, together with his reaction to the death of his son Billy, that Cafferty does not understand how important fatherhood can be in a man’s life. Resurrection Men is also interesting because Rankin offers in it another glimpse of the gangster’s burly physique through the main female character in the Rebus series, Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke. She meets Cafferty for the first time, in his new MGM Lettings office. ‘I’m a businessman these days’, he insists to her, a ‘respectable businessman’ (128, original italics). Clarke sees, instead, ‘a caged predator, quite hiding its ability to pounce’ (128) with eyes that ‘seemed to belong to some alien species, predatory and cruel’ (129). His ‘massive shoulders’ (128) and cool black leather jacket suggest a youthful vitality at odds with his (fake) claim that though his cancer is cured he is ‘still being treated, albeit privately’ (252). Big Ger’s rejuvenating energy comes from his private belief that he cannot be imprisoned again and from his ceaseless striving for more power. At this point, he is considering an expansion beyond his original home turf into Fife and Aberdeen as well as branching out into new criminal opportunities. In Fleshmarket Close (2004), Cafferty starts smuggling illegal immigrants to be exploited as labour all over the United Kingdom. Rebus’s grandfather was a Polish economic immigrant and this also contributes to his turbulent relationship with Cafferty at this stage. The keyword for the gangster is this novel is smugness; this is what ‘the king of Edinburgh’s underworld’ (FC 154) exhibits in the two scenes with Rebus, in which Big Ger appears naked in the jacuzzi of his new mansion. Both men are at this point about fifty-eight years of age and Rebus is seeing younger officers already retiring. Big Ger asserts that he is ‘out of the game’ (220) but the tabloid photos which Rebus obsessively collects for a scrapbook show Cafferty consorting ‘with known villains’ (220) in the

188  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss main British cities. Police enquiries imply that Big Ger controls Tommy Telford’s connections with the Dutch drug rings and Jake Tarawicz’s association with Eastern European sex traffickers. Cafferty, Rebus concludes, ‘had just grown wilier with age—and wiser to the ways the police might go about investigating him’ (221). Full of smugness, Big Ger taunts Rebus he will have nothing but the scrapbook when he retires: ‘And what exactly are you leaving behind, Cafferty? Any hospitals out there named after you?’ ‘Amount I give to charity, there might well be’. ‘All that guilt money, it doesn’t change who you are’. ‘It doesn’t need to. Thing you have to realise is, I’m happy with my lot’. He paused. ‘Unlike some I could name’. (FC 225, original italics) Since their shared scenes are always focalized through Rebus, we can only understand in hindsight the secret enjoyment which Cafferty must obtain from lying to his foe. His lies include pretending that he is not connected with Wee Stu Bullen, the son of Glasgow gangster Rab B ­ ullen, who has moved to Edinburgh following his father’s murder by a rival gang (or the Police, as Stuart suspects). Cafferty claims that Stu, the owner of a club which offers prostitution services connected with Big Ger’s sexual trafficking, is just playing out his own patriarchal drama, ‘stepping out from his old man’s shadow’ (223). In fact, Big Ger has attracted Stu to Edinburgh to take revenge against Rab Bullen for a grudge he has nursed for two decades. Cafferty runs now ‘the whole Scottish operation’ (210) to smuggle immigrants into the UK but, playing deep throat to immigrant official Felix Storey, he reports Stu as the ringleader. Confused and too quick to blame Bullen, Storey eases in this way Big Ger’s handling of the operation, as Rebus explains in the second jacuzzi scene. He tries to persuade Storey to report Big Ger to the police but since this might destroy Storey’s career, Rebus can only bargain for the safety of some immigrant families. Big Ger smugly enjoys the sight of the two men’s quarrelling. This smugness is undermined in The Naming of the Dead (2006) by yet another upstart: Councillor Gareth Tench, a former preacher in charge of Niddrie and of Cafferty’s native Craigmillar. Their ongoing battle already lasts for three years, during which Tench has had the Council reject Cafferty’s applications for gaming and bar licenses, and for a cab office. He is also hindering Cafferty’s recruitment of bouncers and taxi drivers, and his finding new tenants. Rebus’s taunt that Cafferty has ‘finally met someone with the guts to stand up to you’ (ND 255) is confirmed when he hears Tench reply to Big Ger’s threats: ‘You’re in the twilight zone, Cafferty. Wake up and smell the coffin…’ (255, original ellipsis). The novelty in Tench’s case is that he is part of the

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  189 legal structure and, therefore, a more powerful enemy than the younger gangsters. Cafferty explains to Rebus that Tench has ‘righteousness on his side’ and, despairing, he concludes that ‘It’s not the underworld you should be watching—it’s the overworld’ (253 original italics). Even Cafferty is afraid of losing his power for, Rebus finally sees, ‘Tyrants and politicians alike feared the self-same thing, whether they belonged to the underworld or the overworld’ (257). Rankin could have turned Tench into Cafferty’s final nemesis, but he chose to characterize him as, basically, a political gangster in control of the local thugs for his own dubious ends. The Naming of the Dead takes place against the background of the anti-G8 demonstrations of July 2005.9 One of the teen thugs Tench sends to raise havoc badly hurts by accident a demonstrator, who happens to be Siobhan Clarke’s mother. Taking advantage of Clarke’s distress and frustration with the limitations of justice, Big Ger proposes a deal: he threatens the young thug with jail in her presence, unless he helps to turn Tench ‘over to us’ (378, original italics). The phrasing is ambiguous and when Tench is found stabbed to death Clarke is horrified to realize that she has put herself in Big Ger’s hands. He offers her a Faustian bargain to run Edinburgh together, ‘Me going about my business and you swiftly climbing that promotion ladder’ (512 original ellipsis), despite knowing she will reject it. Big Ger just chuckles when Clarke declares that she will not be associated with him in any way ‘until I’m standing in the witness box and you’re in the dock’ (512), for he knows this will not happen. Rankin also presents a very different side of the gangster’s life in The Naming of the Dead: celebrity. Big Ger pays local journalist Mairie Henderson to ghost-write a biography, Changeling: The Maverick Life of the Man They Call ‘Mr Big’, for which Rebus, understandably, refuses to be interviewed. The book is a roaring success, not just in Scotland but further afield. USA, ­Canada, Australia. Translations into sixteen languages. For a time, [Rebus] couldn’t pick up the paper without reading about it. Couple of prizes; TV talk shows for journalist and subject. Wasn’t enough that Cafferty had spent his life ruining people and their communities, terrorising them… now he was a full-scale celebrity. (67, original ellipsis) Mairie has no share in the profits and is bitter that only Cafferty ‘did the book signings, the festivals, the circuit of celebrity parties in London’ (245). Finding herself shunned by colleagues and readers, she starts feeling ‘grubbier than ever’ (246). The only justification she can offer is that Big Ger’s share of the earnings goes to charity. Siobhan Clarke, however, finds out that Cafferty has lied to Mairie and he is making a huge profit out of the book, soon to be turned, he boasts, into a film.

190  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss The popularity of the true crime and the ‘hard man’ subgenres in the UK—with John Blake Publishing10 at the forefront of the trend—is thus subtly criticized by Rankin. In Exit Music (2007), both Big Ger and Rebus reach sixty,11 the mandatory retirement age for the policeman but, logically, not for the gangster. Rankin could have chosen to continue the series with Clarke as the protagonist but he chose instead to involve Rebus in yet more cases, first as a civilian attached to the Cold Cases office (in Standing in Another Man’s Grave), later as a fully active police officer after his temporary re-admission (in Saints of the Shadow Bible), and finally as a civilian retiree (since Even Dogs in the Wild). A study of the London Metropolitan Police Service concludes that ‘for larger police forces, managing with an older police force and higher retirement age could have organisational benefits’ (Flynn ‘Mandatory’ 80). However, Rebus’s case shows that though retired police officers can be helpful in many ways, their professional obsolescence is connected mainly to their lack of currently indispensable digital skills. As regards the ageing criminal, there is a peculiar situation. The sociological studies focus mainly on low-level career criminals, not top gangsters (see Flynn’s ‘Elders as Perpetrators’ and Bramhall). Literary studies of ageing individuals in crime fiction tend to present them ‘often as victims; occasionally as incidental characters; and perhaps most notably as crime investigators (often of the unofficial variety)’ (Hepworth 32). This fits Rebus but not Cafferty. The main exception to this rule, and the ageing villain most frequently mentioned as worth analysing academically, is Mario Puzo’s Don Vito Corleone. Applying an Age Studies perspective to The Godfather and similar fiction ‘might shed light on how hegemonic cultural positions are naturalized through an interplay of categories of difference, including age’ (Kneis & Dallmann 219). This is a weighty issue. Rankin’s crime fiction shows that, as British sociologist Jeff Hearn observes, ‘Older men are, despite their social power as men also subject to ageism, both structural and personal’ (112). Besides, Hearn adds, ‘despite and because of their contradictory social power’ older men ‘may subvert dominant constructions of men and masculinities’ (112). Cafferty’s constant struggle to stay on top of the criminal world is an example of anti-ageist resistance but also a warning that anti-system, subversive men like him operating beyond the law may also endorse a strongly patriarchal, conservative view of masculinity in their own domain. Rankin seems unsure about how to terminate Big Ger’s reign. In Exit Music, Cafferty is almost killed by Todd Goodyear, a promising Police Constable apprenticed to DC Clarke. Goodyear believes that Cafferty may have forced his elder brother Sol to become a drug dealer, for which he is in jail. He is certain that their grandfather Harry—a pub landlord arrested by Rebus in the mid-1980s on a charge of dealing for

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  191 Cafferty—was entrapped by corrupt Police officers (as Rebus, then protecting a colleague, knew). Todd, therefore, frames Rebus for the vicious attack that sends Big Ger to hospital, later confessing that he acted in this way mainly to avenge Sol. When the flatlining alarms sound in the hospital room, Rebus pounds Big Ger’s chest hoping that his foe gets ‘No cold, cleansed death’ (EM 380). Also, because ‘After all we’ve been through… can’t end with a couple of whacks from Todd Goodyear…’ (380, original ellipses). These events happen in the two weeks before Rebus retires. Increasingly obsessed, Rebus understands that he can reach no closure to his career without catching Cafferty red-handed. The Scottish Crime and Drugs Enforcement Agency is also trying to bring Cafferty down, chasing a paper trail to charge him with tax evasion—the same strategy that landed Al Capone in jail. This is not a solution which Rebus welcomes because ‘it was important that it be him making the bone-crunching tackle’ (EM 222, original italics) with much ‘mess’ and ‘fuss’ (222). Their last conversation, minutes before Todd’s assault, implies, nevertheless, that Big Ger is relentless and untouchable. Accordingly, Cafferty taunts his foe once more. The bulls he saw as a child trying to escape the local abattoir are not like him—‘For a time there, I used to think that was me—the last free bull’ (272, original emphasis)—but like Rebus. The policeman is not, however, as Cafferty claims, ‘bucking and kicking and snorting, because you can’t deal with the idea of me being legit’, but because he is raging in frustration at Big Ger’s irreducible villainy.

Beyond Death: Big Ger and the Upstart Darryl Christie The three Rebus novels published after Exit Music in which Big Ger appears feature a new young upstart: Darryl Christie. He is introduced in Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012) and appears next as a gangster on the rise in Saints of the Shadow Bible (2013), a novel without Cafferty. In Even Dogs in the Wild (2015), Christie is already Edinburgh’s main player, having pushed Big Ger practically out of the picture. He prepares then to expand his business operations thanks to a new alliance with top Glasgow gangster Joe Star. Resisting his disempowerment, Big Ger spots in Rather be the Devil (2016) a chink in Christie’s armour and manages to have the younger man imprisoned to rule once more as Edinburgh’s crime boss. In the most recent Rebus novel, In a House of Lies (2018), Rankin allows Cafferty to re-empower himself beyond his original fiefdom to control all of Scotland. Standing in Another Man’s Grave narrates the hunt for a serial killer who murders six young women. One is Annette McKie, Darryl’s sixteenyear-old sister. Christie, here eighteen, is enmeshed in pure patriarchal melodrama, playing a role with clear Hamletian connotations. Frank Hammell, Big Ger’s former employee, is a gangster who manages diverse

192  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss pubs and clubs in West Lothian, a county bordering with Edinburgh. He is also the boyfriend of Darryl’s mother, Gail. Darryl knows, though not Gail, that his father exiled himself to Australia because Hammell threatened to murder him unless he abandoned his wife so that he could seduce her. Darryl stays loyal to his cowardly father while he sees Hammell become his family’s protector (including Annette and the little boys Joseph and Cal). The unsuspecting Hammell sees Darryl as ‘a good kid’ (SAMG 160) and does not hesitate to employ him as the manager of one of his bars. He also trusts the young man with access to key information about his business dealings and practices, which Darryl treasures while he bides his time. When the Police find evidence in Annette’s dead body12 that she was sexually involved with Hammell, Darryl uses this information (without telling Gail) and the know-how accumulated as Frank’s apprentice to get rid of him. Darryl reports Frank to the authorities for tax fraud and legally deprives Hammell of all his property, blackmailing him into selling his ‘entire business for one pound sterling’ (346). He quickly replaces Frank’s employees ‘with leaner, hungrier models who knew where their loyalty lay’ (230). Hammell is appalled by his apprentice’s disloyalty but also helpless. The ‘difference between us’, Christie tells his nominal stepfather and boss, is that ‘I won’t trust anyone’ (346, original italics). Unlike the other upstarts challenging Big Ger, Darryl has avoided teen gang violence, giving himself instead a thorough business self-­education. On the phone with him, Rebus concludes that self-assured, mature ­Darryl has ‘steel’ but ‘brains, too’ (81). This impression is confirmed when they meet in person. Darryl, ‘a handsome enough lad’, wears a suit, which Rebus reads as a way to advertise that he is an adult involved in ‘serious business’ (160). In a later conversation with the always guarded, controlled Christie, Rebus realizes that he is astute: ‘My bet is, you kept your head down in school, did well in exams. But always watchful, learning how things are and what makes people tick’ (321). Like Hammell, Big Ger initially undervalues Darryl’s ambition. Possibly because he has some unsolved feud with Frank, Cafferty presents himself to Darryl as a valuable friend and prospective employer. He does not realize that Christie despises him, as he despised Hammell. Darryl’s first show of rebelliousness is his critique of Big Ger’s violent methods of coercion: ‘(…) You belong in the history books, Cafferty’. ‘Easy, son…’ ‘I’m not your son—I’m not your son and I’m not a kid!’ ‘Whatever you say, Darryl. I know you’re under a lot of stress’. ‘You don’t know the first thing about me’. (279, original ellipsis) Darryl’s cry ‘I’m not your son and I’m not a kid!’ is aimed at Big Ger as much as at Frank but it is not to be misread as mere teenage rebellion.

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  193 This is his first claim to patriarchal authority and is based on an already fully developed sense of entitlement to power. The claim is settled during Annette’s funeral, when Darryl presents himself as head of the family. Big Ger is pleased to have been invited but he is soon disgruntled by Darryl’s open, unexpected challenge. Surrounded by his young, tough ‘muscle’, ‘maybe Army vets who’d bailed from Iraq or Afghanistan’ (387), Darryl announces to Big Ger that he intends to run Hammell’s territory, though he is not ‘looking for a war’ (388) unless their gangsters’ agreement is breached. Big Ger is too surprised by ‘The cheek of the little bastard!’ (388) to disagree, and even admires the boy, recalling how at eighteen he was ‘no more than a foot soldier’ (388). Cafferty feels positively chagrined by his use of a naïve ‘avuncular’ approach at a moment when Darryl ‘already had his plans in place, as cool and calculating as you liked’ (388–389). Deeply shaken, he runs to warn Rebus, also disclosing in this way that he is still in business, not retired as he maintains, and much concerned by the new upstart.13 Even Dogs in the Wild (2015) is focused on the damage that patriarchal masculinity does to the relationship between sons and fathers in two very different subplots, connected through Cafferty. On the one hand, the young man who tries to murder him, Jason Foyle, turns out to be an Afghanistan veteran suffering from PTSD, who goes on the rampage when he finds out that his unloving father was a victim of sexual abuse in his teens. Bryan Holroyd, known as Mark Foyle to Jason, was in the 1980s an inmate of Acorn House, a home for juvenile offenders. Bryan explains in the diary which he passes to Jordan before prematurely dying of cancer that men ‘powerful and full of themselves’ (EDW 397, original italics) used the institution as their sexual hunting ground. The predators include the Lord Advocate David Minton, Chief Constable Broadfoot, Milligan’s casino owner Todd Darlrymple, and MP Howard Champ, aided by accomplices such as care worker Michael Tolland—and Cafferty himself. Big Ger does Champ a favour by removing Holroyd’s body when the boy is presumed to have died, forced to practice sexual strangulation, but ignores that Bryan survived and escaped his henchmen. This is the only criminal act of his long career for which Big Ger shows contrition, insisting that he must apologize to Jason. The young man embarks on his killing spree not just to avenge his father but mainly because, as the diaries show, the abuse suffered prevented Mark from displaying any fatherly feelings: ‘I wanted to shut you away from the world, from all the predators out there. I even feared I might turn out to be one myself’ (EDW 397, original italics). On the other hand, Cafferty witnesses with ‘uncertainty, tinged by fear’ (207) how the confrontation between twenty-year-old ­Christie— here Edinburgh’s fully established crime boss—and his Glasgow counterpart, Joe Stark, evolves. Stark, aged sixty-three, is ‘not quite ready to pass the baton’ (38) to his impatient son Dennis. In Cafferty’s view, Dennis ‘lacked his father’s guile and innate canniness’ (165), yet there

194  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss is another relevant factor at work, presented in a segment focalized through Joe. This is a subplot that, allegedly, narrates what Cafferty’s life could have been like had he had a son and heir. The early death of Joe’s wife Cath, whom Dennis closely resembles, estranged father and son. Joe, a mostly absent father, could never control his son’s anger: ‘His own father had been handy with his trouser belt, delivering it to ears, hands, backside. Fists later on. Joe had behaved in much the same way, until Dennis grew to be a couple of inches taller than him and learned to resist’ (167). Father and son enjoy good times together, but they grow distant when Joe decides that teen Dennis must fend for himself. They are, Joe thinks, ‘commercial partners rather than father and son’ (280). Their personal detachment gives Dennis the justification to deprive his father of his patriarchal power, though the showdown never happens because Dennis is murdered by a disloyal minion. Seeking patriarchal revenge and a younger ally, Joe offers Christie a pact, by which after his eventual death ‘a good-sized chunk of Glasgow would be yours’ (353). Darryl welcomes the association. Big Ger’s comeback seems impossible in view of this strong alliance but he still rejects adamantly Rebus’s proposal that he testifies against Darryl. A conversation between Rebus and Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox intimates that sharp, well-connected Christie, who has never been arrested, may run Edinburgh for years as a ‘responsible criminal’ (EDW 57), for ‘there’s always going to be organized crime’ (58) and a constant demand for illegal products and services. He elaborates: ‘(…) In a place the size of Edinburgh—small city, crime not a huge problem for most of the residents—you might have room for one decent-sized player. And as long as that player doesn’t get too greedy, too cocky or too violent…’ ‘They’ll likely be tolerated? Because they do some of the policing for us’. ‘It’s all about control, Malcolm. That and acting responsibly’. (58 original ellipsis) Darryl, Rebus adds, is ‘a negotiator’ (58) who would have been successful in whatever business field he chose. Cafferty, in contrast, ‘was all about muscle, and not giving a damn about the consequences’ (58), which is why his time may be past. This impression persists in Rather Be the Devil (2016) though Big Ger, presumably nearing seventy in this novel,14 manages in due course to crush Christie. His constant search for useful information reaps the rumour that Darryl, here twenty-two, has made a serious mistake. He has formed a partnership with upper-class scammer Anthony Brough which involves a colossal money-laundering scam (£1 billion) run by Ukrainian gangster Aleksander Glushenko, a collaborator of the Russian mafia.

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  195 Brough convinces Christie to use one of the hundreds of shell companies linked to his betting shops as a convenient cover. Rebus deduces that Christie accepts this dangerous deal because the drug seizures by Border Force Scotland have left him financially overstretched. Since he owes money to his Glasgow ally Joe Stark, Christie needs to trust Brough against his instincts. This turns out to be a major error. Brough skims £10 million off the operation, attracting towards Christie the unwanted attentions of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs officers but also of Glushenko. Big Ger’s participation in Christie’s fall is cunning and devious but also far-fetched. Rankin has frequently explained that he does not plot his novels beforehand but adds details as he progresses, which might explain the low plausibility of the Brough subplot. Cafferty learns from one of his many informers that Brough’s personal assistant Molly is seeking revenge against her callous boss. She is angry at Brough’s ill-treatment of his sister Francesca, disabled in her youth after a botched suicide attempt caused by Brough’s jealous murder of her lover (his best friend). Molly suggests ripping her boss off the £10 million which she knows he has stolen and Big Ger, acquainted with the plan through his informer, offers his help. He also puts Glushenko on the trail of Brough and Christie. Aware of Big Ger’s intervention, Rebus reaches Darryl’s home just in time to save the young man’s life and allow him to execute in cold blood the Ukrainian gangster. He counsels Darryl to plea self-defence, which will limit his prison sentence to about ten years, but too angry to think rationally Christie rushes off to assault Cafferty. Alerted by Rebus, Cafferty defends himself. Darryl survives the serious skull wound which Big Ger inflicts to face a decades-long sentence, though he still refuses to testify against Edinburgh’s self-restored crime boss. Cafferty never accepts Christie’s gradual conquest of what he considers to be his personal territory and patiently waits for the chance to bring down his enemy. His motivation is justified. Far less convincing is Rankin’s devaluation of Darryl Christie. The competent kid gangster of previous novels is here a nervous man making absurd mistakes. He is also infantilized. Christie tells Rebus in Saints of the Shadow Bible that he lives alone in a penthouse but in this later novel he is sharing a home with his mother and brothers; this house is, besides, a copy of Big Ger’s mansion. Christie’s momism is also highlighted by DC Clarke after she meets Gail McKie—Christie ‘may have kept his dad’s surname, but ­Darryl’s heart belongs to Mummy…’ (RBD 50 original ellipsis)—though it feels unconvincing and contrived. When Christie shoots Glushenko in the face, a perplexed Rebus hears him muse ‘Look at the mess—Mum’s going to kill me’ (RBD 297). This childishness plainly contradicts Darryl’s earlier characterization as a self-confident man. Rankin unjustifiably defangs Christie by depriving him of his patriarchal gravitas and by turning him into an Oedipal case—which he never was, despite

196  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss the Hamletian overtones of his confrontation with Hammell. This loss of stature, perhaps intended to make Big Ger appear to be invincible, ultimately diminishes their remarkable rivalry. With Christie in Barlinnie, ‘the old devil is back…’ (RBD 308 original ellipsis). In a House of Lies (2018) confirms that the Rebus series has gradually become Cafferty’s story. Hero and villain are here (supposedly) seventy-two but whereas Rebus is in very poor health, defeating Christie has rejuvenated Cafferty once more. Rankin places ailing Rebus in an increasingly uncomfortable position, cast in the role of a pitiable oldage pensioner who cannot accept giving up work. ‘Managed decline’, a phrase Rebus borrows from a patient at the clinic where he is treated for his emphysema, ‘seemed to sum up his whole life since retirement, and maybe even before’ (IHL 108) but also his characterization in the post-Exit Music novels. The distance between the non-­drinking, non-smoking, ill Rebus and ‘his shadow self’ (102), here a dynamic Cafferty, grows spectacularly in this novel. The resolution of a missing person’s case which DI Siobhan Clarke investigates with Rebus’s underhand help—as he cannot possibly be a formal collaborator—allows Big Ger to renew his alliance with Irish gangster Conor Maloney. Back in 2006, when Cafferty was Edinburgh’s only drug supplier, the contaminated product sold by an imprudent, independent young dealer, Graeme Hatch, caused six consumers to OD, with one dying. Trying to intimidate his blackmailer, private detective Stuart Bloom, Hatch killed him accidentally. The intense police surveillance that followed the drug scandal and Bloom’s disappearance scared Conor Maloney away from the deal which Cafferty wanted to sign in order for them to push together the Bartolli family out of Aberdeen’s crime scene. Despite occasional contacts, the two gangsters were ‘never quite able to trust one another’ (126), a situation which radically changes when Bloom’s body is found, and his murderer identified. Big Ger laments how ‘Events had robbed him of the larger prize’ (184), meaning ‘Aberdeen and Glasgow. Christ, maybe even Newcastle. And from there… who knew?’ (184 original italics and ellipsis). This is, presumably, the territory that Cafferty will soon conquer once the truce with Maloney is sealed. During the phone call that establishes the new alliance, a jubilant Big Ger enthuses that ‘Brexit’s15 going to be a gold mine for disaster capitalists’ (368), as he labels himself and his new partner. Rebus receives direct confirmation from Christie that Big Ger runs not only legitimate concerns (a car wash, flat rentals, minicabs) but also ‘the drugs, the brothels, the fences, the illegal immigrants. He’s taking a cut from everyone and everywhere and nobody’s doing anything to stop him’ (201). A Police contact corroborates Cafferty’s criminal activities but claims that there is ‘no evidence’ and, hence, ‘no surveillance operations against him currently under way’ (243). There is even a veiled critique from Rankin, and this is unusual, hinting that the newly

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  197 reorganized, technology-oriented Scottish Police force works to the advantage of villains like Cafferty. In a third-person narrator passage, focalized through Rebus, a complaint is voiced that no one knew what exactly Cafferty had taken from Christie because the Serious Crimes Unit at Gartcosh—a place equidistant from Glasgow and Edinburgh—is ‘based half the country away. Police Scotland’s process of centralisation meant a lot of local information-gathering either didn’t happen or went ignored’ (153). In a House of Lies bemoans, then, the inability of modern police systems to control large-scale villainy. Rankin’s defence of the methods of police officers with strong local roots is, however, carried out in a highly controversial way. One of the lowest points in Rebus’s career, and life, happens when he forces Hatch to confess his murder of Bloom by threatening to report his drug-dealing activities to Big Ger. Rebus even alludes to the pig farm which Cafferty uses to get rid of his enemies. This ugly scene happens in an interview room of a Police station and in the presence of complicit Detective Chief Inspector Graham Sutherland. Rebus may be using his rival as a bogey man to scare Hatch, but his intervention becomes frankly criminal when he passes to Big Ger the names of the two corrupt policemen in his payroll who helped Hatch to hide Bloom’s body. By the end of the novel, one of them is already missing, which means that Rebus is an accessory to murder. The satisfaction that solving Stuart Bloom’s murder may bring is a pyrrhic victory—or no victory at all, considering how it helps Cafferty and Maloney to form their new partnership. Only Rankin knows when Big Ger’s villainous career will end and how. Whatever end he chooses for him and for Rebus the point made through Cafferty’s still open narrative arc is clear enough: villainy is a machinery of power stronger than the law and although individual v­ illains may fall the machine survives. The rivalry between Rebus and Big Ger has never been a contest between equals but a relationship distorted by Cafferty’s progressive, constant re-empowerment and Rebus’s gradual disempowerment. Both are examples of a tough, patriarchal masculinity that is becoming outmoded; yet, whereas Rebus runs the risk of becoming a ludicrous hero as he ages, Cafferty’s old age is having the opposite effect: he is becoming an even more formidable villain.

Notes 1 The first novel, Knots & Crosses, was published in 1987. Rankin himself originated the label ‘tartan noir’ to describe his fiction, later popularized thanks to a book cover blurb signed by American author James Ellroy. Tartan noir was subsequently used to categorize all Scottish crime fiction (see Wanner). 2 This apartment is Rankin’s current residence. Rebus’s apartment on Edinburgh’s Arden Street is the place where Rankin wrote the first novel in

198  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss the series. Later, he moved to a mansion in Duddingston, which belongs to Cafferty in the novels. The author acknowledges that his recently moving to Cafferty’s apartment ‘is really weird. I’m sure a psychoanalyst could make much of the fact I have gone from being the hero of my books to the villain of my books’ (in Law n.p. online). 3 This scheme was the outcome of Cafferty’s ‘unholy alliance’ with Glasgow villain Jinky Johnson, a man somehow connected to Big Ger’s wife, formerly known as Morag Johnson (BB 358). Jinky, possibly her husband, disappeared soon after Cafferty met Morag. 4 Tommy is already a gang boss at twelve. He starts his conquest of Edinburgh by forcing one of Cafferty’s young lieutenants to hand over a gaming machines franchise. Next, Tommy buys a casino and a hotel, interests which he combines with drug smuggling, a prostitution ring, and some legitimate businesses in Glasgow: ‘casinos and video shops, restaurants and a haulage firm, plus a property portfolio which made him landlord to several hundred people’ (HG 48). Telford is not yet thirty. 5 The referendum celebrated on 1 March 1979 followed the Scotland Bill of 1978, presented by James Callaghan’s Labour Government. An amendment introduced by Scottish MP George Cunningham—a Labour representative for a London constituency—conditioned the results to a minimum participation of 40% of the electorate. Since only 32.9% participated, the majority vote of 1,230,937 (51.6%) in favour of Devolution was not enough for the re-establishment of a Scottish Assembly (Denver et al. 16 and 23). 6 The second referendum was celebrated on 11 September 1997, following the Referendums (Scotland & Wales) Act of 1997, implemented by Tony Blair’s Labour Government (Denver et al. 46–47). The Scottish Parliament building was the cause of a major scandal because the initial budget escalated to a final cost several times more expensive than the original estimate. 7 Cafferty uses, as Rebus suspects, his cell-mate’s medical record. Big Ger’s wife Morag dies of unknown causes one year before he is released from Barlinnie. He does not attend her funeral, fearing that one of his rivals might take the chance to murder him. 8 The Scottish Independence Referendum, celebrated on 18 September 2014, gave a negative result of 55.30%. The Scottish Parliament voted against the British Government’s Brexit deal on 18 December 2018 (see www.gov. scot/news/parliament-rejects-brexit-deal/). Scotland has always maintained a pro-European Union position which might eventually lead to a second referendum. 9 PM Tony Blair hosted the 31st G8 summit between 6 and 8 July 2005 at the Gleneagles Hotel in Auchterarder. The protests, organized by a coalition of diverse NGOs, were massive. The London bombings took place in the middle of the summit, on 7 July, though Rankin does not mention them. 10 Established in 1991 by a former tabloid journalist, John Blake Publishing issues books of many descriptions aimed at a large readership. By mid2019 their ‘Hard Bastards’ series ran to forty-three books, including autobiographies and memoirs written by celebrity gangsters (see https:// johnblakebooks.com/). See for Scotland, Holland & Richards’s Scottish Hard Bastards (2007). 11 Rebus retires at the end of Exit Music on 24 November 2006 (he was born, therefore, in 1946). He breaks into Big Ger’s huge mansion, while the gangster is in hospital, and opens the safe at the first attempt, correctly guessing that the combination is Cafferty’s birthday, ‘Eighteen ten forty-six’ (EM 345). Incidentally, Rebus finds inside a wedding certificate dated 1973, possibly proof that Billy was Cafferty’s legitimate son and Morag Johson his second wife.

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  199 12 Rebus tries to trap Christie by luring him to kill Annette’s murderer, Kennie Magrath, who is still at large for lack of evidence. Christie escapes arrest but, terrified by his threats, Magrath confesses. In Rather Be the Devil, Rankin discloses that Magrath was jailed but soon murdered by a fellow inmate under contract from Darryl. 13 Treating his foe’s enemy as a potential ally, Rebus establishes a precarious understanding with Christie. In Saints of the Shadow Bible, he has been readmitted as a police officer but demoted to his old 1987 position as Detective Sergeant because of ‘a surfeit of DIs’ (7). Darryl, here the owner of the seedy club Gimlet, appears as ‘a player in the city’ (153). He is worried that gangster Rory Bell is invading his territory and Rebus takes advantage of Christie’s gratitude after Bell is killed, with his indirect intervention, to have Darryl scare a murderer into confessing. 14 Rankin has acknowledged in diverse interviews that he is slowing down time in his novels, disrupting their once coherent internal chronology to stretch Rebus’s years as a civilian investigator. See Williams (online audio). 15 At the time of writing, October 2019, the British Parliament has not yet accepted the deal signed by former PM Theresa May to abandon the European Union and a no-deal situation seems likely to happen, with current PM Boris Johnson as its main defender.

Works Cited Bell, Eleanor. ‘Ian Rankin and the Ethics of Crime Fiction’. Clues 26.2 (Winter 2008): 53–63. Bertens, Hans & Theo D’haen. ‘The Old Guard Continued: Kaminsky, Parker, and Block’. Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 39–57. Björnsson, Sveinn Birkir. ‘Dancing Pigs and Drunken Detectives. An Interview with Ian Rankin’. Grapevine 30 June 2006. www.grapevine.is/Author/ ReadArticle/Dancing-Pigs-and-Drunken-Detectives Boddy, Kasia. ‘Scottish Fighting Men: Big and Wee’. Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature, Eleanor Bell & Gavin Miller (eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. 183–196. Bramhall, Gaynor. ‘Older Offenders and Community Penalties: A Framework for Thinking’. Ageing, Crime and Society, Azrini Wahidin & Maureen E. Cain (eds.). Cullompton: Willan, 2006. 230–247. Breu, Christopher. ‘Hard-boiled Masculinity and the Work of Cultural Fantasy’. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2005. 1–22. Davies, Andrew. City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013. Densley, James A. How Gangs Work: An Ethnography of Youth Violence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Denver, David; James Mitchell, Charles Pattie & Hugh Bochel. Scotland Decides: The Devolution Issue and the 1997 Referendum. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Flynn, Edith Elizabeth. ‘Elders as Perpetrators’. Elders, Crime, and the Criminal Justice System: Myth, Perceptions, and Reality in the 21st Century, Max B. Rothman, Burton B. Dunlop & Pamela Entzel (eds.). New York: Springer, 2000. 43–85.

200  Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss Flynn, Matt. ‘Mandatory Retirement in the Police Service: The Case of the London MPS’. Policing 34.1 (2011): 67–82. Harris, Siân & Malcah Effron. ‘Detective Fiction and Serial Protagonists: An Interview with Ian Rankin’. The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in Crime Fiction, Film and Television, 1990–2010, Malcah Effron (ed.). Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 173–183. Hearn, Jeff. ‘Imaging the Aging Men’. Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, Mike Featherstone & Andrew Wernick (eds.). London: Routledge, 1995. 97–114. Hepworth, Mike. ‘Old Age in Crime Fiction’. Ageing and Later Life, Julia ­Johnson & Robert Slater (eds.). London: Sage Publications, 1993. 32–37. Hobbs, Dick. Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Holland, Jimmy & Stephen Richards. Scottish Hard Bastards. London: John Blake, 2007. Kneis, Philip & Antje Dallmann. ‘Age Studies: Godfather Is Aging’. Approaches to American Cultural Studies, Antje Dallman, Eva Boesenberg & Martin Klepper (eds.). New York: Routledge, 2016. 213–220. Law, Sophie. ‘Ian Rankin Plans to Downsize to Edinburgh Apartment Block Where the Fictional Nemesis Lives’. Daily Mail Online 9 February 2019. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6685523/Ian-Rankin-plans-downsizeEdinburgh-apartment-block-fictional-nemesis-lives.html Martín, Sara. ‘Aging in F(r)iendship: Big Ger Cafferty and John Rebus’s’. Clues 29.2 (2011): 73–82. Pittin-Hédon, Marie Odile. ‘Re-imagining the City: End of the Century Cultural Signs in the Novels of McIlvanney, Banks, Gray, Welsh, Kelman, Owens, and Rankin’. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, Berthold Schoene (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. 262–271. Plain, Gill. ‘Rankin Revisited: An Interview with Ian Rankin’. Scottish Studies Review 4.1 (Spring 2003): 126–137. Rankin, Ian. In a House of Lies. London: Orion, 2018. ———. Rather Be the Devil. London: Orion, 2016. ———. Even Dogs in the Wild. London: Orion, 2015. ———. Saints of the Shadow Bible. London: Orion, 2014 (2013). ———. Standing in Another Man’s Grave. London: Orion, 2013 (2012). ———. Exit Music. London: Orion, 2007. ———. The Naming of the Dead. London: Orion, 2007 (2005). ———. Fleshmarket Close. London: Orion, 2005 (2004). ———. Set in Darkness. London: Orion, 2005 (2000). ———. Resurrection Men. London: Orion, 2002 (2001). ———. The Hanging Garden. London: Orion, 1999. ———. Black & Blue (1997). London: Orion, 2002. ———. Let it Bleed (1995). London: Orion, 2005. ———. Rebus: The St. Leonard Years (Strip Jack, The Black Book, Mortal Causes) (1992, 1993, 1994). London: Orion, 2001. ———. Rebus: The Early Years (Knots & Crosses, Hide & Seek, Tooth & Nail) (1987, 1990, 1992). London: Orion Books, 2000.

Big Ger Cafferty, Crime Boss  201 Schoene, Berthold. ‘Nervous Men, Mobile Nation: Masculinity and Psychopathology in Irvine Welsh’s Filth and Glue’. Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature, Eleanor Bell & Gavin Miller (eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. 121–145. Severin, Laura. ‘“Out from the Mentor’s Shadow”: Siobhan Clarke and the Feminism of Ian Rankin’s Exit Music (2007)’. Clues 28.2 (Fall 2010): 87–94. Sloma, Stefani. ‘The City as Character: Edinburgh in the Works of Ian Rankin’. Researcher 25.2 (Summer 2012): 53–95. Snyder, David R. Elder Crimes, Elder Justice. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2014. Wanner, Len. Tartan Noir. Glasgow: Freight Books, 2015. Williams, Phil. ‘Ian Rankin on his New Best-seller’. BBC Sounds 10 October 2018. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06ng6ff. Audio. Wright, Alan. Organised Crime: Concepts, Cases, Controls. London: Willan, 2006.

9 Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic Self-empowerment as Self-destruction

Intelligent Self-defence against Absolute Villainy The Harry Potter (1997–2007) series by J.K. Rowling is a timely political fable aimed at young readers. Rowling narrates how a teen boy must assume the responsibility of stopping a coup led by an extraordinarily powerful dark wizard, Lord Voldemort, because the adults in charge of the system of government in the wizarding world are unable to protect it. Beyond its celebrated, charming surface, the heptalogy functions as a cautionary tale, aimed at teaching its target young readers how to react in the face of obvious danger to the community—even when this is denied—by using a combination of bravery, common sense, and group solidarity. Harry’s heroic fight against the villain certainly ‘provides a site of discussion of a democratic society’s response to elitism, totalitarianism and racism’ (Carey 105). Voldemort’s first assault on power—the First Wizarding War (1970– 1981)1—only ends because the deathly curse which he casts against baby Harry Potter, then aged one, is deflected by the protecting spell that the death of his mother Lily throws on the little boy. Voldemort has taken the precaution to split his soul in several pieces, encased in the magical objects known as Horcruxes, to survive in case of mortal attack; this is how he survives his own killing curse, though he loses his body. Voldemort eventually narrates to his band of followers, the Death Eaters, that this loss is an unexpected consequence of his dedication to the Dark Arts: ‘I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost… but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do not know… I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality. You know my goal—to conquer death. And now, I  was tested, and it appeared that one or more of my ­experiments had worked… for I had not been killed, though the curse should have done it’. (HPGF 707–708, original ellipses) It takes the Dark Lord fifteen long years, during which he survives by possessing the bodies of animals and of his naïve follower, Hogwart’s

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  203 Professor Quirrell, to regain an anatomy that can be called human, as a first step to launch the Second Wizarding War (1995–1998). His resurrection expresses a general anxiety about how the far right is rebuilding itself across Europe for, like Voldemort, ‘Totalitarian regimes rise and fall; and once they fall, they may come back, always hidden and disguised in their march to power’ (Lacassagne 332).2 His return also connects with the deeply set fantasy which supposes that Hitler never really committed suicide in 1945 but, somehow, survived the fall of Berlin and could have returned to claim power, aided by his faithful Nazi retainers.3 Voldemort’s genocidal politics and his aim to exterminate all wizard and witches with Muggle (non-magical) parentage connect, obviously, with the Nazi racist ideology, as many commentators have noticed. It is safe to say that Rowling expresses in her series a manifest anxiety that, if not Hitler in person, then Nazism—or any form of ­fascism— might return to power because it was not successfully rooted out. The other main anxiety that Rowling explores in her series focuses on the role that the British Government played in failing to stop Hitler by implementing the ineffective Appeasement policy. Barrats argues that Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge’s ‘refusal to face the truth’ of Voldemort’s return ‘does as much damage to the wizarding world’s ­preparation as the Munich Agreement did for Britain’s’ (134) in 1938.4 In fact, this is a partly unfair comparison. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain ­(1937–1940), the main British politician behind Appeasement, ‘saw avoidance of war as the outright and overwhelming priority’ (Kershaw Making Friends 236) at a time when Europe was still traumatized by WWI, and when the main ‘European enemy was Communism’ (Gilbert & Gott 41). He made very serious mistakes regarding both Hitler and Mussolini and it is generally accepted that ‘it was Chamberlain’s obsequious and predictable behaviour in the face of repeated humiliations which encouraged the dictators to ignore his warnings, precipitating the largest conflict in history’ (Ruggiero 187). Yet, his morally suspect policy was never dictated by a wish to preserve his post or his power. Chamberlain sincerely believed that he was doing the best for his nation, and so did the nation at least initially. In contrast, the aptly named Fudge becomes increasingly tyrannical as he refuses to acknowledge the Dark Lord’s return. His stubborn resistance to facing the truth is not based, like Chamberlain’s was in Hitler’s case, on an honest desire to avoid a devastating new war but on his selfish fear of losing his position to his most detested rival—the Head of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Albus Dumbledore. Dumbledore’s own youthful indulgence in supremacist anti-Muggle ideas means that Harry is handed down a deficient, problematic patriarchal heroic scenario, as he gradually discovers. His mentor’s reputation is tainted and so is that of Harry’s other male helpers: his teachers Severus Snape and Remus Lupin, his godfather Sirius Black, even his dead father James. The Ministry of Magic cannot offer fair justice nor

204  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic properly defend the wizarding community, either. To cap these failings, the villain is intimately connected to Harry through a peculiar mental link, and the teen boy discovers horrified that the eventual victory will cost him his life. It can be argued that Rowling’s ‘phallocentric world’, where ‘the tests of a male’s virtue is whether he will win contest after contest with his wand’, is so popular because it offers ‘a feeling of security’ (Zipes 183) based on the classic patriarchal trope of the chosen hero—again a white, European, middle-class man (or, rather, boy). Like the male authors I have dealt with here, Rowling endorses a typically British view of benevolent patriarchy embodied by the resilient hero. The Harry Potter series, however, addresses far more directly than the other texts I have examined in this volume the problem of how to respond to absolute villainy—personified by a man willing to abandon his humanity to conquer power beyond death but ‘most frightening because he is human’ (Deavel & Deavel ‘Skewed Reflection’ 136)—while the discourse on traditional masculinity crumbles around the hero Harry. Rowling’s solution is not presenting ‘a psychologically androgynous hero (…) more adaptable than most others’ (Adney 177, my italics) by supposedly feminizing him, but bringing to the fore the discussion of the hero’s masculinity. It might seem that in the Harry Potter series, ‘boys are stereotypically portrayed, with the strong, adventurous, independent type of male serving as a heroic expression of masculinity, while the weak, unsuccessful male is mocked and sometimes despised’ (Heilman & Donaldson 155) but this is a misreading. Harry is often ridiculed and reviled by his male and female peers, the Ministry of Magic, and the media and must constantly negotiate the ‘tension that exists between societal expectations and the experiences of boys who don’t always conform’ with hegemonic masculinity (Wannamaker 122). With him Rowling offers an alternative model radically unlike predecessors such as James Bond—though closer to Tolkien’s Frodo— that ‘can benefit both boys and men, and the girls and women in their lives’ (Wannamaker 122). 5 For this model to be accepted with no hesitation, Harry is pitted against a most frightening, extreme instance of patriarchal villainy, only comparable, as I am arguing, to Hitler. The main novelty which Rowling introduces is the fact that Harry’s task is not really to kill Voldemort but to deprive him of his invulnerability. The boy forces his foe to make a second, final mistake in his struggle to defeat him and, thus, Voldemort’s second killing curse backfires again, this time ending his life. The main lesson which Harry learns and teaches is that the best strategy to defeat villainy is not violent aggression but intelligent self-defence. His reward, as the epilogue shows, is not epic glory and honour but a happy private life as a father and husband—a life as far as possible from the lust for power that leads Voldemort down the darkest path.

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  205

Blood and Wands: Power and the Magical Body Discussing The Lord of the Rings, John Garth observes that the fairytale tradition contains ‘two apparently contradictory versions of Faërie’ (107). In one, as he shows using examples from The Canterbury Tales, Faërie is presented as ‘an Otherworld like the Arthurian Avalon’; in the other tradition, fairyland has ‘faded from general view’ (108) but still subsists in folk tales. Tolkien supposed that each version was a phase in Middle-earth’s history: when the Elves’ time passed, so did the first type of Faërie. In Rowling’s series both traditions are combined: the wizarding world overlaps with the ordinary world of the Muggles (or ordinary people) but remains concealed by powerful spells because, Hagrid tells an inquisitive Harry, otherwise ‘everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems’ (HPPS 51). Occasionally, these two parallel worlds blend and children born of Muggle parents, such as Harry’s friend Hermione Granger, manifest magical abilities. By age eleven they are recruited into the wizarding world with an invitation to train as students at Hogwarts, the only establishment of its kind in Britain (presumably located in the Scottish Highlands). Voldemort and his Death Eaters want to impose a supremacist pure-blood regime to end this mobility, purge the wizarding world of all Muggle-born child and adult wizards, and enslave the unsuspecting Muggles. Magic is never fully explained but should perhaps be understood as a mutation, with the corresponding gene surfacing by accidental transmission through ‘blood’ (DNA, to be precise). Since the magic gene does not result in perceptible bodily features, the ideology that Voldemort embraces but does not invent (just as Hitler embraced already existing anti-Semitism) cannot be defined as racism but as a type of speciesism combined with classism. Its aim is to exclude Muggle-born ‘­mudbloods’—the ugly slur Draco Malfoy uses against Hermione—from the privileged positions occupied by old pure-blood families (like the Malfoys and the Blacks). The transmission of magic is, nonetheless, tied to unknown factors and children of pure-blood families may be born as non-magical Muggles, known as Squibs (such as Hogwarts’s caretaker, Argus Filch). There is, then, ‘no correlation between the purity of one’s blood and one’s magical abilities’, a circumstance which makes the pureblood argument ‘all the more ridiculous’ but ‘consistent with our own world of human collectives’ and derogatory prejudice (SterlingFolker & Folker 118). Another key factor highlights the irrationality of anti-­Muggle prejudice. Sirius Black explains to Harry that ‘If you’re only going to let your sons and daughters marry pure-bloods your choice is very limited; there are hardly any of us left’ (HPOPH 105). Likewise, Harry’s pure-blood friend Ron Weasley observes that ‘Most wizards these days are half-blood anyway. If we hadn’t married Muggles we’d’ve died out’ (HPCS 89).

206  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic This critique of the untenable pure-blood ideology barely conceals, as many commentators have noticed, widespread wizarding supremacism. Wizards and witches ‘universally look down upon Muggles, and being a wizard means joining an elite world’ (Ostry 93). Muggles run autonomously their society ‘because wizards have kind-heartedly and charitably chosen that it should be so’ (Gupta 108), but not because they have been given a choice or offered participation, Gupta adds, in any institutions of the wizarding world. Rowling offers in this way yet another version of the topos of the white man’s burden, counteracted only with a very weak form of anti-racism (or anti-speciesism) based on sheer personal benevolence rather than structural change. Anatol even argues that ‘the resonance of racialized imperialist tropes in the Potter novels might provide one explanation for the books’ tremendous popularity’ (109). This means that the critical interpretations which connect the series with the Holocaust (Patient & Street) must be contextualized by an examination of the supremacist values, inherited from Victorian times, which lie behind the text and the wizarding world. Peppers-Bates and Rust maintain that ‘pre-existing institutions within Hogwarts and the Wizarding World’—like anti-Muggle prejudice or abusive house-elf subjection—‘set the stage for Voldemort’s totalizing pure-blood utopia’ (110). All wizarding individuals are empowered above ordinary Muggles by their magical bodily powers, although without a Hogwarts education their inborn abilities remain undeveloped. The school trains children only in the positive use of magical powers, keeping the Dark Arts strictly off limits. For this reason, Defence Against the Dark Arts is a central course in the curriculum. Voldemort’s main offence is not, arguably, his attempt to impose wizarding supremacism (which many others support) but his wilful decision to disobey the explicit injunction to practice magic within agreed upon limits. He takes his innate powers to their highest possible level by mastering the forbidden arts; this is his main sin but also the root of his attractive. Reading Voldemort’s choices from a Nietzschean perspective, ­Battacharya contends that his ‘status as a villainous celebrity is as much a manifestation of the magical community’s need to set limits to individual achievement as it is a result of his own desire to realize in actual terms what magic theoretically promises’ (n.p. online). Bhattacharya criticizes the hypocrisy of the wizarding society and their abhorrence of Voldemort’s villainy since this emerges from the mismanagement of power by the whole community. Less sympathetic towards Voldemort, Holland argues, borrowing from Heidegger, that whereas Harry and his allies possess an ontological humility ‘in the face of the magic that was given to them’, the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters ‘are marked by their arrogance, their certainty that they deserve the power they have and that those who lack it are inferior’ (1, my italics). Patriarchal villainy, as I have been arguing, is the product of this arrogance and of the ensuing

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  207 sense of entitlement to power. The Dark Lord’s deviation from the norm results in ‘a self-constructed hell on earth’, Rothman observes, that should be read as ‘a warning to those who can identify good and evil choices but find the choosing to be difficult’ (205). This is an optimistic reading based on the supposition that the innately arrogant individuals will not identify with Voldemort. They might even read Harry Potter— and any other narrative about villainy—as a chronicle of the errors to avoid in the search for self-empowerment. Rowling never suggests that girls and women are less proficient at magic. Potent witches can be found on both sides of the Dark Arts divide, as Hermione and Bellatrix Lestrange show. Nonetheless, the discourse on the misuse, or abuse, of magical powers in the series is closely connected with the construction of masculinity, both patriarchal and anti-patriarchal. Boys and girls wield wands to cast spells and curses, but one specific wand becomes a crucial phallic element in the confrontation between the male villain and hero: the Elder Wand. This unique wand can become the perfect instrument for the expression of total power if used by a villainous wizard (no witches are linked to it), as Voldemort knows. In the lore of Rowling’s system of magic, the Elder Wand occupies a singular position as one of the three Deadly Hallows which allow their owner to master death (the others are the resurrection stone and the invisibility cloak). The matter of the Hallows is, ultimately, only relatively important in the Dark Lord’s narrative arc. Voldemort ignores the function of the set of Hallows because, being an orphan raised by Muggles, he never read the children’s book The Tales of Beedle the Bard which narrates the legends. He frantically searches for the fabled Elder Wand simply because it is supposed to be the most powerful wand available. An untrained first-year Hogwarts student would be unable to express any significant power through the Elder Wand, but Voldemort believes that the wand will respond to his finely honed powers. The Dark Lord, however, is prone to making many critical mistakes. He misconstrued the power of Lily Potter’s spell to protect Harry and he fails to understand who the Elder Wand belongs to. All wands chose their owners, top wand-maker Garrick Ollivander repeatedly insists, and Voldemort concludes that in order to be chosen he must kill the Elder Wand’s owner. Making a series of wrong assumptions, he murders three men: two (wand-maker Gregorovitch and Dark wizard Grindelwald) did possess the wand at one point, but the other, Severus Snape, never did. The sequence of events is convoluted. The Elder Wand passes to Draco Malfoy when he disarms Dumbledore—the true owner of the Elder Wand, won from Grindelwald in a famous duel—intending to murder him. Dumbledore and Snape had previously agreed that if this happened Snape would kill the Headmaster to protect the boy’s soul and also because Dumbledore is, anyway, dying. Later, Voldemort steals the

208  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic Elder Wand from the Headmaster’s grave and murders Snape, wrongly believing that he owns the wand. In fact, since Harry subsequently disarms Draco—and all wands belonging to a defeated rival change allegiance to the winner—he owns the Elder Wand buried with Dumbledore. When Voldemort faces Harry in their final duel armed with this wand, he is convinced that absolute patriarchal power (magical and political) belongs to him. Harry casts a simple Expelliarmus spell to disarm his foe, the Elder Wand obeys him, and Voldemort’s Avada Kedavra killing curse is pushed back onto his heart by the power coming out of the more modest wand in the boy’s hands. Harry’s truly heroic act is not the elimination of the villain, since Voldemort is defeated by his own errors, but his rejection of the Elder Wand—which he only uses to repair his own broken wand.6 This decision surprises not only Ron and Hermione but also the critics who find ‘something really magical in his immunity to the lust for power’ (­Williams & Kellner 139). Whether the Elder Wand is returned to Dumbledore’s tomb, as happens in the seventh final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or broken, as shown in the film adaptation, the point made is the same one: Harry is happy enough to be an ordinary wizard, that is to say, an ordinary man in the context of his society, and rejects all temptation to use his political and magical powers beyond what his community allows and he personally desires. The pure-blood doctrine may not necessarily die with Voldemort, but, after the havoc he wreaks, nobody volunteers to lead it again.7

Magic Is Might: Voldemort’s Origins and the Ministry of Magic The deeply ingrained prejudice against Muggles and mudbloods, alive in the wizarding elite circles including the Ministry of Magic, and the fusion of political power with magical power, allow Voldemort to rise. He comes, however, from a socially marginal position and it is, therefore, necessary to examine how he develops his villainous sense of e­ ntitlement to power and whether this could have been prevented. The critics’ opinions are divided between the nature and nurture options. Tom Riddle—Voldemort’s real name—remains indeed a riddle. Lis and Tuineag read the Dark Lord as a textbook case of antisocial personality disorder, accompanied by ‘severe psychopathology’ but no ‘mental disorder’, caused by ‘intergenerational transmission of abuse (…), a stressful gestational period, abandonment at birth, and neglect or abuse in his childhood’ (287). Blake highlights Voldemort’s descent from Salazar Slytherin, the founder of the eponymous Hogwarts House and a prominent defender of the pure-blood ideology, noting that Rowling’s novels ‘constantly present genetic inheritance as crucial, and knowledge and prejudices based on genetic inheritance as deeply problematic’

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  209 (in Blake, Carretero-González & Márquez-Linares 175). For others, the boy Tom is a victim of his discrimination as a dispossessed orphan by the snobbish wizarding community and of Dumbledore’s inability to prevent the worst results of his marginalization, a shortcoming ‘as tragic as the crimes Riddle later committed’ (Bell 63). There are even hints that Dumbledore shares Riddle’s memories with Harry through the magical pensieve ‘to avoid sole culpability’ and justify ‘his analysis of Tom’s inherently evil nature’ (Blackford 156). The argument that Riddle is naturally inclined to do evil is also invoked by the scholars who connect him with his main literary predecessor, Tolkien’s Sauron, in view of ‘the branding of their possessions, the importance of and fear inspired by their names, their desire for immortality, and their inability to comprehend love’ (Benham 25). Voldemort seems closer to Melkor/ Morgoth but Carretero maintains that he is not only ‘a literary progeny of Sauron’ (the original Dark Lord) but also of Saruman. Tolkien’s Sauron and Saruman, she adds, share with Rowling’s ‘fallen wizard, Salazar Slytherin, the snaky etymology of their names, with all their biblical echoes’ (in Blake, Carretero-González & Márquez-Linares 172). There is an evident risk of falling into the trap of mythologizing Tom Riddle and accepting his self-presentation as the larger-than-life Lord Voldemort. Despite his inborn powers and his proficient use of the Dark Arts, Riddle is not a supernatural, non-human being—like Melkor/ Morgoth, Sauron, or Saruman—but a human male that makes terrible choices. Rowling provides him with a rather detailed backstory which combines magic with far more mundane aspects, and these are definitely worth exploring. ‘That Rowling uses the archetypal Victorian orphan as her template can be expected’, Washick writes. ‘However, the surprise is that she uses Dickens’s protagonist not as the model for her hero but for the villain—creating, in essence, an Oliver twisted’ (n.p. online). Perhaps this is not so surprising. Dickens asks us to believe in Oliver’s innate goodness despite his dreadful childhood as a workhouse orphan and even a budding criminal. His reward is being rescued by kind, wealthy John Brownlow to lead a respectable upper middle-class life. Rowling asks us to consider in Riddle’s case why his rescue by Albus Dumbledore does not work and invites us to explore the riddle of where the villain’s sense of entitlement comes from. She has no specific answer but nor does anyone else. A series of revelations gathered by Dumbledore and offered to Harry mainly in the sixth volume, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, provide us with Riddle’s early story. He is the son of pure-blood witch Merope Gaunt, the last descendant together with her brother Morfin from Salazar Slytherin. Merope, a victim of abuse—possibly even of incest with either her father or her brother, or both—seduces and marries handsome, upper-class Muggle Tom Riddle. He, however, abandons his already pregnant wife in disgust as soon as the love potion which she is

210  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic using wears off. Devastated, Merope gives birth to Tom in the orphanage from where Dumbledore rescues him eleven years later. Harry asks why she never used magic to protect herself and her son and the Headmaster speculates that possibly ‘her unrequited love and the attendant despair sapped her of her powers’ (HPH-BP 245). No critic has blamed Tom Riddle senior for his son’s ulterior transformation into Lord Voldemort even though his inability to love the devoted Merope and to bring up his own boy is a most significant factor in the biography of this villain. Dumbledore’s visit to the orphanage to announce that Tom has been awarded a place at Hogwarts confirms the orphan boy’s already apparent sense of entitlement. The invitation elicits no questions and no wonder. The beautiful boy, ‘his handsome father in miniature’ (HPH-BP 252), coolly declares that ‘I knew I was special’ (254). Aware of the string of serious offences attributed to Tom by the director of the orphanage, Dumbledore sees that Tom’s ‘wild happiness’ made ‘his finely carved features seemed somehow rougher, his expression almost bestial’ (254). As Hook contends, ‘Tom’s resilience rests in his belief that he is different, more powerful than others’ but since he cannot feel any ‘positive emotion’ his coping skills are ‘cruelty, defensiveness, and domination’ (101), which he first tests with the other orphans he abuses. Hook cannot explain, and possibly nobody can, why Riddle’s brain cannot generate constructive feelings—we might speculate that this is, as Rowling hints, the effect of the bad blood generated by the purebloods’ constant inbreeding, perhaps even a genetic glitch or mutation. Whatever the case, for the teen Riddle, already an advanced scholar at Hogwarts, the ‘last straw’ (Hook 101) is his finding out that his mother preferred death to raising him and that his father is a Muggle who wants no relationship with him. To sever himself from his disappointing family background, Tom, then sixteen, murders his grandfather Marvolo Gaunt (framing his uncle Morfin for the crime), his father, and his paternal grandparents, literally ripping his soul apart with these violent crimes. As an institution devoted to the reproduction of wizarding power(s), Hogwarts ends up stimulating Tom’s appetite for domination. While he presents a most charming façade to his teachers and classmates, particularly those in Slytherin House to which he belongs, the boy Riddle gives himself a parallel education in the Dark Arts, necessarily using resources at hand. Hogwarts’s library, as Hermione knows, contains all kinds of information if one knows where to look. The dates are not fully reliable,8 but Riddle’s Hogwarts years appear to be the period between 1938 and 1945, coinciding with WWII. 1945 is also the year in which Dumbledore, then a Hogwarts teacher, wins the Elder Wand from his foe Gellert Grindelwald (his former close friend and lover), by then the leader of a pure-blood league.9 In his last two years at Hogwarts, Riddle learns not only his true origins but also how to split his soul and keep the fragments enclosed in the Horcruxes.

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  211 At seventeen—no longer a minor according to wizarding law—Riddle seems ready to embark on a most promising career in the Ministry of Magic, but he unexpectedly chooses a very different, far more modest path, employing himself at Borgin and Burke’s, dealers in magical objects. Fine-looking, pleasant Riddle is entrusted with the task of seducing reluctant owners into selling prize possessions. The discovery of a relic belonging to his family—the Slytherin locket which famished Merope sold for a pittance—in the hands of a rich elderly witch, Hephzibah Smith, precipitates a crisis. A furious Riddle, then aged about thirty, kills this woman for his heirloom and escapes to Albania—a generic exotic location in Rowling’s series—to immerse himself in the Dark Arts for about one decade. In those years, Dumbledore recalls, Riddle ‘consorted with the very worst of our kind, underwent so many dangerous, magical transformations, that when he resurfaced as Lord Voldemort, he was barely recognizable’ (HPCS 254). Once returned, Voldemort starts gathering back his Hogwarts followers—transformed into the Death Eaters, an organized band which should be defined as a terrorist group—to launch the first assault on power, around 1970. This biographical trajectory suggests that Voldemort’s extremely individualistic personality does not allow him to be part of a larger group, except as a leader. Tally contends that his ‘unwillingness to integrate himself into society is what, in the end, prevents him from both knowing and ruling that society’, making him also inhuman (42). He tries twice to get himself appointed to the post of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts, expecting to control the wizarding world through its children, though only tepidly. Even when the Ministry falls in his hands—after Fudge’s successor Rufus Scrimgeour is killed, and the new Minister, Pius Thicknesse, falls under the Imperius Curse— Voldemort remains a ruling power in the shadows. Remus Lupin clarifies to a befuddled Ron that ‘Effectively he is the Minister, but why should he sit behind a desk at the Ministry? His puppet, Thicknesse, is taking care of everyday business, leaving Voldemort free to extend his power beyond the Ministry’ (HPDH 171). In this he is as different from Adolf Hitler as possible. Reagin also observes that the Dark Lord lacks ‘Hitler’s political charisma and power as a speaker’ (128). Whereas Hitler knew how to seduce his audience, Voldemort never addresses the wizarding community. ‘Given how Voldemort looked’, Reagin quips, ‘this was probably for the best’ (128). Far from being a charismatic leader—except perhaps for the besotted Bellatrix—Voldemort is even for his Death Eaters a terrifying figure because of his altered looks and his unpredictably violent behaviour. Their fear explains why their loyalty ebbs so dramatically when he disappears after attacking baby Harry. The Death Eaters seem positively relieved that their monstrous leader is gone and are far from pleased when they contemplate his remade body in Harry Potter and the Goblet

212  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic of Fire; then the Dark Lord is quick to notice ‘a stench or guilt upon the air’ (HPGF 701). Voldemort manages to elicit again their loyalty but even those who do stand by the defence of pure-blood privilege—such as Draco’s father Lucius Malfoy—need to be forced, even blackmailed, into taking part in the Second Wizarding War. Without a doubt, one of Voldemort’s most despicable actions is his transformation of sixteenyear-old Draco Malfoy into a Death Eater and his ordering the boy to murder Dumbledore as a strategy to control Lucius. The irony of Voldemort’s situation is that he opposes an official system of power that is more than willing to accommodate his pure-blood ideology. When the First Wizarding War erupts, the Ministry of Magic offers so little resistance that Dumbledore needs to organize the Order of the Phoenix, basically using Hogwarts students and staff as troops. Remus Lupin, one of the original members, recalls that they were only twenty and the Death Eaters about four hundred; many of the rebels, particularly those from the main wizarding families, were members of the Ministry’s staff. The technical details of how exactly Voldemort managed to control the Ministry for the eleven years that end with Lily and James Potter’s murder are never itemized, beyond Dumbledore’s disquieting comment that ‘the years of Voldemort’s ascent to power were marked with disappearances’ (HPGF 653) and, as the case of Neville Longbottom’s parents shows, illegal detention and torture. Only Voldemort’s foolish persecution of Harry ends his rule. Lacking sufficiently committed lieutenants, his regime collapses together with his body. By the time of his return, the wizarding world has gone through a period of calm of about thirteen years, though this calm is only apparent. Supposedly, wizards and witches participate in a democratic political system dependent on general elections and popular consent. The mandates of Barthemious Crouch, the former Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and of the Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge ­ bjectionable— suggest, nonetheless, that the Ministry’s legal policies are o to say the least. Crouch is a power-hungry politician who used during the First Wizarding War brutal methods to hunt down the Death Eaters, including the application of the Unforgivable Curses10 against detainees. Harry’s godfather Sirius Black, also a victim of legal abuse, explains that Crouch felt overwhelmed by the terror which Voldemort was causing and ‘fought violence with violence’ to the point that he ‘became as ruthless and cruel as many on the Dark Side’ (HPGF 572). The wizarding justice and prison system are particularly nasty, considering how magic could be employed in positive ways. The use of, for instance, the Veritaserum potion or of memories played in pensieves might alleviate many tragic errors. Despite this, Sirius, Hogwarts’s gamekeeper Hagrid, and many others are imprisoned in Azkaban without a trial, following a perfectly legal Ministry prerogative. Azkaban, part of a legitimate, democratic system of power, is a horrendous, merciless

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  213 place. This fortress, placed on a North Sea island, is designed for cruel punishment rather than re-education. Its guardians, the appalling Dementors, are horrifying creatures which prey on any positive feelings that the ill-treated prisoners might manage to enjoy. The Ministry uses them as well to execute condemned individuals by means of their feared Kiss (the punishment that awaits Azkaban escapee Sirius if he is caught). Remus tells a horrified Harry that Dementors ‘clamp their jaws upon the mouth of the victim and—and suck out his soul’; a person, he adds, may still survive with no soul but ‘you’ll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no… anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery’ (HPPA 182, original ellipsis). Crouch’s political zeal leads him to send his own son Barty, a confirmed Death Eater, to Azkaban at the end of the First Wizarding War. This patriarchal sacrifice cannot prevent, however, his demotion and the end of his political aspirations; it even costs Crouch his life when his son escapes to take murderous revenge. Fudge not fully condones the Ministry’s cruel methods—he has Barty executed on the spot with no trial after the murder—but also helps Voldemort to rise again, as noted, with the constant denials of his return. Woefully underqualified for the post and a ‘Bungler if ever there was one’ (HPPS 51), Fudge, ‘the archetypal weak administrator’ (Deavel & Deavel ‘Character’ 55), is an insecure man who constantly fears losing his power. Dumbledore hints that, though no Death Eater, the Minister supports the main pure-blood tenets, which possibly also plays a role in his inexcusable inefficiency. This consists not only of passive inaction but also of an active attempt at dismantling the few elements of self-defence against Voldemort which the wizarding community can still use. Fudge is convinced that the rumours of the Dark Lord’s return are false, part of a campaign orchestrated by Dumbledore to be appointed in his place. Consequently, his Ministry launches a campaign to control Hogwarts, ultimately forcing the Headmaster to flee or risk imprisonment in Azkaban. Dolores Umbridge, Fudge’s appointed representative in Hogwarts, is, arguably, the most hateful character in the Harry Potter series, even above Voldemort. The Dark Lord is the stuff of nightmares, an awesome figure whose monstrosity results, paradoxically, from very human impulses: hatred of his Muggle father, fear of death, lust for power. ‘Toadlike witch’ (HPGF 137) Umbridge, in contrast, is a petty tyrant at a much smaller scale but also a figure that young readers of the series may fear with more passion: she is a sadistic teacher who enjoys torturing her students, as Harry learns first-hand. Rowling gives this Ministry bureaucrat an unpleasant personality expressed through a panoply of gestures, outfits, and objects usually connected with sympathetic femininity. Umbridge frequently smiles, prefers pink and mauve for her clothes and her office, and loves cute kittens. This raises the question of whether there is covert misogyny in her portrait. Hopefully, this is not

214  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic the case and Rowling attacks through Umbridge the apparently harmless bureaucratic personality that might facilitate genocide, if the conditions arise. Dolores Umbridge is, in short, Rowling’s version of Hannah Arendt’s warning against the banality of evil. Appointed High Inquisitor of Hogwarts, apart from his post as Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Umbridge undermines the educational system built by Dumbledore. She also implements Fudge’s paranoiac policies by depriving the students of any actual experience in self-defence. In this way, what he fears—that Dumbledore may lead some type of covert resistance—does happen, though under Harry’s leadership: the teen students react to Umbridge’s destabilizing teaching by forming an association, which student member Ginny Weasley dubs Dumbledore’s Army. Whereas Fudge fears above all losing his political power, Umbridge is simply a firm believer in pure-blood doctrine. She is initially sceptical about the rumours concerning the Dark Lord’s return but as soon as Thicknesse is appointed Minister, signalling Voldemort’s take-over of the Ministry, Umbridge shows her true colours by establishing and running the Muggle-Born Registration Commission. This office, as its name indicates, forces wizards and witches with Muggle parents (like Hermione) to register as a step previous to their being accused of magical thievery. In a harrowing scene, Harry, Hermione, and Ron witness the harsh interrogatory of one Mary Cattermole, a witch accused by Umbridge of passing herself off as a magical person since her ­Hogwarts years. Persons like this unfortunate witch are routinely stripped of their rights and sent to Azkaban, though of course nothing can deprive them of their inborn magical powers, as Umbridge must know. It is important to stress that neither the register nor the inquisitorial pseudo-trials are Voldemort’s idea. This is a case, as Ian ­Kershaw describes regarding Hitler’s dictatorship, of working towards the Führer—or Dark Lord. Umbridge is an example of how the worst personal instincts flourish if given sanction by a leader not even directly involved in the policies implemented. She is also proof of how the complicity between Voldemort’s illegitimate power and the Ministry’s legitimate rule makes resistance a truly heroic affair.

Connected to the Villain: The Nature of the Soul in the Harry Potter Series American novelist Don Delillo invented for his post 9/11 novel Falling Man (2007) the notion of ‘organic shrapnel’, a fragment of flesh from the torn body of a suicidal terrorist that gets embedded in the skin of survivors.11 Rowling could not be aware of this concept since her final Harry Potter novel was published in the same year but Delillo’s weird, bizarre invention is useful to explain how Harry and Voldemort are connected.

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  215 There are hints throughout the series that villain and hero share many features. Both are orphans with unhappy childhoods and even look similar, as the memory of sixteen-year-old Tom, embedded in his magical diary, observes. ‘There are strange likenesses between us, after all. Even you must have noticed’ (HPCS 233), Riddle remarks. Even so, he concludes that ‘there is nothing special’ (233) about Harry except Lily’s charmed protection. Harry’s discovery that he speaks Parseltongue (the serpents’ language) and, most worryingly, that he can frequently see through Voldemort’s eyes and share his emotions (specially his rage) confuses him deeply. ‘The direct experience of Voldemort’s desires, anger, and malice opens us to what drives his dread universe’ (Wolosky 114) and provides readers with a singularly close representation of evil. This is not, nevertheless, Rowling’s main concern, nor is she indicating through their link that Harry is potentially a villain like Voldemort. Their proximity connects with how she represents the soul in the series: just as Delillo fantasises that the victims of terrorism carry in their bodies organic shrapnel from the perpetrators, Rowling supposes that Harry’s body contains a fragment of the villain’s soul, shed when he murdered Lily and James. This is the reason why Harry must accept death: he needs to allow Voldemort to murder him so that the splinter can be destroyed. Once this happens, Harry can return to life because his own soul is intact. He can then try to destroy Voldemort for good, provided that all the other six fragments of his soul outside the Dark Lord’s body are also destroyed, a task in which the help of Harry’s friends—Ron and Hermione but also Neville—is fundamental.12 The wizarding world has no organised religion,13 nor any other alternative rituals apart from the specific acts of magic. Perhaps because of this lack, Rowling’s soul mystique is rather inconsistent. We know from Lupin’s comments on the Dementors that souls can be destroyed for ever and that an individual can survive without a soul as an ‘empty shell’ (HPPA 182). In Bassham’s view, souls are in the series ‘material substances’, which explains why ‘soul-splitting creates deep and probably insuperable problems for personal identity’ (25). Sehon, in contrast, claims that Rowling adopts a ‘sentimental view of the soul, according to which the soul is associated with that which makes us most human, with our capacity to love and our moral conscience’ (17, original italics). Voldemort, therefore, gradually loses his physical and moral humanity in the process of dividing his soul into pieces. Whether material or spiritual, the soul must be kept ‘intact and whole’ (HPH-BP 465). Young Riddle learns from a reluctant, frightened Professor Slughorn that splitting one’s soul ‘is an act of violation’ which goes ‘against nature’ (HPH-BP 465); it gives its owner the chance of being immortal but only at the cost of committing the evil act of murder. Even so, it is doubtful that the Horcruxes where Voldemort keeps the fragments of his soul provide ‘an eternal guarantee of life’, for they seem to

216  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic offer ‘rather a mere lifelong guarantee’ (Stojilkov 136) no more efficient than a computer’s back-up, possibly less. Klein, like many others, accepts the widespread view that Voldemort’s only aim is ‘cheating death’ and that his striving after immortality is the root of his evil (36). There is, however, no plot point in the series that explains in which specific ways Voldemort expects to become immortal and, as events unfold, it seems obvious that his magic is not truly useful to keep him alive. Harry learns to be a man mainly by distancing himself as much as possible from the villain. The readings which claim that Voldemort ‘represents the obscene side of the Law’ and that he is ‘Potter’s father’s “dark side” to use the Star Wars analogy’ (Jagodzinski 132) are thrilling but ultimately a distortion. Harry is not linked to Voldemort in the same personal way in which Luke Skywalker is connected to his father Anakin, the man behind Darth Vader and, so, unlike Luke, Harry does not need to accept and love the villain as his dark father. There are, however, evident similarities between Anakin and Tom Riddle. Both men undergo a monstrous transformation after their fall to the dark side though they react, in any case, very differently when death approaches. Vader is redeemed by the love of his son and repents but Voldemort ‘rejects his final chance for redemption’ for ‘he has indeed expelled from himself any sense of decency or shame’ (Smith & Smith 128). Hermione reports to Harry and Ron the contents of a footnote in a book which Riddle knows very well, Secrets of the Darkest Art 14: a fragmented soul can be repaired by remorse even though the excruciating procedure can destroy the individual attempting the deed. ‘I can’t see Voldemort attempting it somehow, can you?’ (HPDH 89), she concludes. With her comment she gives Harry, nonetheless, the key to the villain’s mentality and to his own alternative, anti-patriarchal masculinity. During their final duel, Harry teaches Voldemort the main lesson he has learned from Hermione: a man is a person with a wholesome soul who can feel remorse. Accordingly, he urges his enemy to ‘Be a man… try… Try for some remorse…’ (HPDH 594 original ellipses). Unlike Harry, Voldemort ‘does not care about good or evil—and thus about morality’, hence ‘he cannot be appealed to on moral grounds’ (Guanio-Uluru 110). Still, ‘Of all the things that Harry had said to him, beyond any revelation or taunt, nothing had shocked Voldemort like this’ (HPDH 594). Remorse hurts, Rowling teaches her readers, but it can heal broken souls and turn a patriarchal monster into a proper man even if he is destroyed in the process—as happens to Anakin Skywalker. This lesson applies particularly in Rowling’s series to Severus Snape. He accepts becoming a double agent for Dumbledore driven by his remorse at having caused the death of the woman he loves, Lily Potter. Young Snape, then a trusted Death Eater, rushes to tell his admired Voldemort about the prophecy announcing that a child, born of parents who have defied him, will be his worst enemy. Snape fails to foresee,

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  217 however, that his bigoted master will single out half-blood Harry (Lily’s parents are Muggles) and not the other possible candidate: pure-blood Neville Longbottom. Lily’s ensuing murder becomes a moral burden which Snape carries all his life and for which he tries to atone by secretly protecting Harry, following Dumbledore’s orders. In contrast, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and James Potter, who do show some remorse but never apologize nor atone for their merciless bullying of fellow student Snape at Hogwarts, are characterized as flawed men. Snape’s irrational dislike of Harry as James’s son and his own acerbic personality prevent any type of personal bonding. For this reason, Snape can only teach Harry the crucial lesson that he must defeat Voldemort using self-­defence rather than aggression indirectly, with the duelling lessons which he teaches together with Professor Gilderoy Lockhart (Kim 41). Dying of the wounds inflicted by Voldemort’s snake Nagini, Snape allows Harry to collect his personal memories to teach the boy post-humously the value of remorse, atonement, duty, protectiveness, and romantic love. Albus Dumbledore’s contribution as a valued male role model is more controversial. The initial chapter of the first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, establishes in the opening conversation between Professor Minerva McGonagall and Dumbledore that Voldemort only fears him as a rival. The Dark Lord suspects that Dumbledore’s magical powers are greater than his own and worries that if he challenges Hogwarts’s Headmaster he might lose—as Grindelwald once lost. McGonagall massages her boss’s ego by stressing that if he has not used his vastly superior powers this is ‘Only because you’re too—well—noble to use them’ (HPPS 14). Dumbledore has no such high opinion of his own personal nobility, as he grants when Harry notices in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that his right hand looks oddly blackened. During the quest to destroy Voldemort’s soul Dumbledore correctly guesses that one of the Horcruxes—Marvolo Gaunt’s ring—carries the resurrection stone, one of the three Hallows. Tempted, perhaps even more than Voldemort, to master death—he already possesses the Elder Wand and could easily take back Harry’s invisibility cloak, James Potter’s bequest—Dumbledore puts on the ring. This causes an infection (presumably a product of Voldemort’s curse) which, according to Snape’s diagnosis, will end his life in about one year. Whereas in The Lord of the Rings Frodo is symbolically castrated by Gollum with the loss of his middle finger when he hesitates to cast Sauron’s ring into Mount Doom, Dumbledore is punished with death for a similar offence. Snape’s memories reveal to Harry what he could not understand at the time: Severus did not murder Dumbledore following Voldemort’s orders but following the Headmaster’s request for a mercy killing which is also, in a way, self-punishment for his transgression. The other issue that lends Dumbledore a villainous cast, beyond the struggle to suppress his yearning for immortality, is the purpose of his

218  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic relationship with Harry. Rowling did her character no favour with her impromptu declaration, after completing the series, that Dumbledore is gay.15 Her claim may even appear to validate the scandalous biography which tabloid journalist Rita Skeeter publishes as part of the Ministry of Magic’s ugly post-humous smear campaign. Skeeter, a proven liar, asserts that the Headmaster ‘took an unnatural interest in Potter from the word go’ (HPDH 29), clearly intending the adjective ‘unnatural’ to hint at concealed paedophilia. After Dumbledore’s outing, this blatant lie—the only comment in the heptalogy about his sexuality—takes on problematic homophobic connotations. The suggestion that Dumbledore’s behaviour towards Harry is far from impeccable is, besides, complicated by Snape’s discovery that the Headmaster has concealed for years the fact that the boy must die for Voldemort to be defeated. A ‘horrified’ Snape accuses Dumbledore of ‘raising [Harry] like a pig for slaughter’ (HPDH 550). Harry’s death, as I have noted, is necessary for him to get rid of the piece of Voldemort’s soul embedded in his body—for the boy is a sort of accidental Horcrux—but Dumbledore puts Harry in mortal danger without fully trusting him (or Snape) with the truth. In contrast, Dumbledore’s literary predecessor, Gandalf, shares with Frodo a detailed list of the terrors he will have to face and gives him the choice to accept or reject his mission. Dumbledore does give Harry the choice to die rather than face Voldemort but by then the Headmaster is already dead and probably just a vision in the boy’s troubled mind.16 Fenske makes the remarkable claim that because he is ‘the driving force behind the whole plot’ Voldemort ‘is the true hero of the series as much as the villain-hero of the Gothic novel’ (182), men like Victor Frankenstein, or, perhaps more appropriately Dr. Jekyll (both he and Voldemort experiment with themselves and reduce their bodies to a degraded new anatomy). This half-veiled admiration for the villain as a heroic breaker of rules and seeker of dangerous knowledge and power is an example of our own collective submission to the naturalization of what Pierre Bordieu calls ‘masculine domination’ and I am calling patriarchal villainy. Bordieu warned that ‘The strength of the masculine order is seen in the fact that it dispenses with justification: the androcentric vision imposes itself as neutral and has no need to spell itself out in discourses aimed at legitimating it’ (9). This argument is as valid for the hero as for the villain which is why, as I have been doing here, it is important to foreground the patriarchal (not the masculine) order to which they belong. Voldemort may be the driving force, but he is a force of patriarchal destruction. In Voldemort’s case, Rowling borrows from Gothic (for the whole series is a Gothic text) the convention of showing in the villain’s face and body the effects of his malignity. As I observed in the case of the Bond villains, this is a jaded convention which is now being contested. What is peculiar to Tom Riddle’s case is not only that ‘The destruction

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  219 [he] experiences at each stage of his life is linked with his own choice of actions’ (Hart 156) but also that he never seems to regret the loss of his original personal beauty (possibly because this is a consequence of his own actions). Voldemort is first introduced as the alarming ‘chalk white’ face ‘with glaring red eyes and slits for nostrils, like a snake’ (212) lurking beneath Professor Quirrell’s turban in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. This is not really the physical appearance which he acquired after the spectacular backfiring of his curse against Harry and the subsequent loss of his body, as readers might assume. Riddle’s ophidian look emerges much earlier from his practice of the Dark Arts, which is what destroys his good looks. Dumbledore’s memory of Riddle’s return to Hogwarts shows him, as Harry sees thanks to the pensieve, in the process of losing his personal attractive: ‘It was as though his features had been burned and blurred; they were waxy and oddly distorted, and the whites of the eyes now had a permanently bloody look, though the pupils were not yet the slits that Harry knew they would become’ (HPH-BP 413). Voldemort seems content with that unappealing appearance but he himself feels as much ‘revulsion’ (HPGF 694) as his helper Wormtail at the shape of his body during the intermediate stage of his return. Unicorn blood and the milk of his serpent Nagini transform the bodiless Voldemort into ‘something ugly, slimy, and blind—but worse, a hundred times worse’ which mimics the shape of a human baby: ‘It was hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs were thin and feeble, and its face— no child alive ever had a face like that—flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes’ (HPGF 694). In the climactic scene in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when Voldemort recovers his adult body the onlookers feel terrified, but the monstrous villain is satisfied enough. Harry sees ‘the dark outline of a man, tall and skeletally thin, rising slowly from inside the cauldron’ (696), where his own blood, a bone of Voldemort’s dead father, and Wormtail’s severed hand simmer as ingredients for the spell. The boy looks aghast at the nightmarish face: ‘Whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose that was flat as a snake’s with slits for nostrils…’ (697 original ellipsis). In contrast, after examining his reborn body, Voldemort feels ‘rapt and exultant’ (699). Rowling’s clichéd monstrification of the villain does not contemplate the possibility that Lord Voldemort could have preserved his good looks, perhaps aided by the Dark Arts, to conquer a type of villainous celebrity (borrowing Bhattacharya’s concept) with no paragon. Hibbs complains that despite their capacity for mayhem, ‘evildoers in the Potter universe are either pathetic, weak sycophants or malevolent beings who rule through fear, hatred, and preying upon the innocent’ (93). The opposite effect, that they (and particularly the Dark Lord) might be able to elicit the willing submission of the wizarding community thanks to their physical appeal and a charming demeanour is, however, even scarier.17

220  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic Tom, who starts life endowed with personal beauty and allure, chooses to subject his soul and body to a poisonous course of ill-treatment that ultimately brings nothing positive. His reptilian looks are the best possible lesson in Defence against the Dark Arts, for who would want to daub in them at that cost? As I have contended elsewhere (see Martín ‘Voldemort’), not only does Rowling’s correlation of power with monstrosity feel stereotypical and strained, it also undermines the appeal of magic. Voldemort’s Dark Arts, assumed to be the most potent variety of magical power, cannot even prevent his bodily degradation. In contrast, in current science fiction the creation of post-human beings thanks to advanced technology usually results in extremely attractive individuals, with enhanced abilities and ever youthful bodies. A main issue in the novels by authors such as John Scalzi or Richard K. Morgan is in which exact ways these individuals are monsters since their appearance is not at all monstrous. Voldemort’s gratuitous uglification is so exaggerated that it appears to be parodic rather than the centrepiece of a scary cautionary tale. Rothman claims that, despite being an ‘engrossing if not engaging villain’, Voldemort ‘lacks the capacity to haunt the nightmares of even young children’. He wonders whether only ‘a particularly aware adult’ can see that ‘the depth and power of evil stem from its empowerment through social structures’ (213). If we accept his view, this means that Voldemort’s monstrosity is not effective enough; because of this deficiency, the main message of the Harry Potter series fails to be fully intelligible for its target readership, which might be the case. Most likely, child and young adult readers are attracted to the series by the exciting idea of an alternative education based on magic than by the confrontation between Harry and Voldemort. After all, who could really doubt that this quintessentially nice guy would ultimately defeat the ugly monster? Despite the faults in Voldemort’s characterization, the Harry Potter series does contain a valuable lesson about how an alternative model of gentler masculinity can defeat patriarchal villainy and about the importance of collective action, even by the very young, to resist tyranny. So far, criticism of Rowling’s heptalogy has mostly taken Voldemort for granted as a necessary but secondary piece in the machinery of the heroic tale. This approach needs to be changed in forthcoming discussions of the Harry Potter series and of the expanding wizarding universe (particularly in relation to Gellert Grindelwald). The villain, not the hero, is the character entrusted with the function of creating the crisis that sets the plot in motion, but this is something we too often forget. Examining what Voldemort’s rise and fall discloses about the stories we prefer is thus of utmost importance, particularly at a time when it is more than evident that the phantom presence of fascism is growing all over the world and might result in the rebirth of the worst times the human species has seen so far. Against the rising darkness, our only defence is a firm rejection of all lust for power and of patriarchal villainy.

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  221

Notes 1 Harry Potter’s internal chronology is remarkably coherent. The story begins on 31 October 1981, the day when baby Harry survives Voldemort’s attack. The wizarding community celebrates in the streets the Dark Lord’s disappearance and Professor Dumbledore eases Professor’s McGonagall’s fears of discovery by the Muggles remarking that ‘We’ve had precious little to celebrate for eleven years’ (HPPS 13). Voldemort’s rebellion, hence, started in 1970. 2 This point has been recently made very forcefully by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in her volume Fascism: A Warning (2018), written in response to Donald Trump’s unexpected election as President of the United States in November 2016. 3 Timur Vermes’s satirical novel Look Who’s Back! (Er Ist Wieder Da, 2012, translated into English by Jamie Bullock, 2014) and its film adaptation (2015) by David Wendt are a recent example of this fantasy. Fiction as diverse as Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976), in which clones from Hitler’s DNA are produced by Dr. Joseph Mengele, or George Steiner’s The Portage to Saint Cristobal of A.H. (1981) in which a very old Hitler is hunted down by Israeli agents in the South American jungle, also belong to this trend. 4 Voldemort has been associated to Margaret Thatcher, too. Journalist Jesse Cohen was among the first to note that his ‘11 years of terrorizing the wizards’ realm’ are ‘the same number of years’ Thatcher was Prime Minister. Cohen adds that Thatcher was ‘certainly a witch to many of her critics, using her power with Voldemort-like ruthlessness’ (n.p. online). Westman agrees, contending that the tensions caused by WWII in Britain were not dispelled by either Thatcherism or PM Tony Blair’s New Labour: ‘Contemporary events equally resonate with the series’ concerns about how power is gained, exercised, and maintained within society’ (328). 5 Of course, many disagree. Among them, Steveker complains that ‘Rowling’s hero might be less violent, less chauvinistic and less stereotypically masculine than, for example, Indiana Jones and James Bond, but, in the end, he comes to embody a notion of heroism which they, too, represent: with Harry, a hero is still an essentially solitary man rescuing the world from evil’ (81, original italics). Harry may face Voldemort on his own in their final duel, but he is by no means alone. The Hogwarts battle shows that, even after Harry’s presumed death, his friends, most teachers, and other wizards and witches still resist tyranny. 6 Interestingly, this is the twin of Voldemort’s original wand: the same phoenix feather was used for their core. The detail suggests that the amount of power given to an individual does not automatically condition whether he or she will do good or evil with it—this is a personal choice. 7 The popular but controversial play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016)  by Jack Thorne—from an original story by Thorne himself, John Tiffany, and J.K. Rowling—supposes that while he fought Harry, Voldemort spared some time to beget a daughter with Bellatrix Lestrange. Delphi Diggory, as the orphaned girl is called, grows obsessed by her wish to avenge her father. In an alternate timeline in which Harry dies in the duel (the play uses as its main gimmick a Time Turner), Voldemort is the unopposed ruler of the wizarding world and Delphi controls the Ministry of Magic. 8 A key clue is provided by a tombstone in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The dates of birth and death for Tom Riddle Sr. are 1905–1943. Tom Jr., born on 31 December, supposedly in 1926, is (most likely) sixteen when he murders him. Dumbledore fetches Tom, aged eleven,

222  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic from the orphanage in August 1938. Riddle graduates from Hogwarts in June 1945, aged seventeen. Next, he works for Borgin & Burkes, possibly between 1945 and 1957, before disappearing for about ten years. He reappears, around 1967, to apply for the job of Defence against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts, with no success. As Lord Voldemort, Riddle mounts a first rebellion in 1970 (aged forty-three), which lasts until 1981, when he (by then fifty-four) attacks baby Harry. By the time Harry first attends Hogwarts, Voldemort is sixty-four; he regains his body four years later to begin his second onslaught on the wizarding world. Riddle dies on 2 May 1998, aged seventy-one, defeated by seventeen-year-old Harry. In the film adaptations, in which he is played by Ralph Fiennes, Voldemort is younger: the actor, born in 1962, played the villain aged between fifty-five and fifty-nine, in four of the eight films. 9 The ongoing five-part film series scripted by Rowling, Fantastic Beasts, narrates Grindelwald’s rebellion (from 1927 to 1945). Two films have been released so far: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)—the title of protagonist Newt Scamander’s best-selling magizoology textbook—and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018). The series is expected to conclude in 2024. 10 The Unforgivable Curses are thus called because their use is unforgivable in the sense of being inexcusable. The Imperius Curse allows the perpetrator to control and manipulate other people, the Crucio Curse is used for torture, and Avada Kedavra to murder. 11 A medic tells Keith, the protagonist, that months after an attack the survivors ‘develop bumps’ which are ‘caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body’. These ‘pellets’ of human flesh are called ‘organic shrapnel’ (16). There is no medical evidence of this phenomenon. 12 In a strange plot twist, Rowling supposes that Harry cannot kill Voldemort without first destroying his soul fragments because the villain carries in his body another type of organic shrapnel. When he uses Harry’s blood to rebuild his body in Goblet of Fire, Voldemort acquires traces of Lily’s protective spell. This does not counteract his villainous inclinations but makes it impossible for Harry to kill a man protected by his mother’s love. 13 Although Catholic Tolkien was not attacked for the demonic nature of Morgoth and Saruman, Anglican Rowling has been the object of numerous critiques against the supposedly satanic subtext of her wizarding world, mainly in publications issued by American Christian fundamentalists. The most recent public burning of Harry Potter books and DVD in the United States took place in February 2017 (see Alexander). 14 After Dumbledore’s funeral Hermione retrieves this volume from his office. This is presumably the manual which teen Riddle used to train himself; most likely Dumbledore took it off Hogwarts’s library when he realized that other power-hungry students could read it. 15 Rowling outed Dumbledore during an encounter with fans in 2007, replying to a question from a member of the audience: ‘My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay’; she added that ‘Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald [a bad wizard he defeated long ago], and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was’ (in Smith n.p. online, original square brackets insertion and ellipsis). The film series Fantastic Beasts is supposed to explore the consequences of this relationship. 16 The awful creature which Harry sees, lying helpless beneath a bench in the heavenly version of King’s Cross Station where the strange scene takes places, is likewise the boy’s vision, in this case of the remains of Voldemort’s soul. 17 Of course, here lies the appeal of le Carré’s villainous Apollo, Richard ­Onslow Roper.

Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  223

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Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic  225 Reagin, Nancy R. ‘Was Voldemort a Nazi? Death Eater Ideology and National Socialism’. Harry Potter and History, Nancy R. Reagin (ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011. 127–152. Rothman, Ken. ‘Hearts of Darkness: Voldemort and Iago, with a Little Help from their Friends’. Vader, Voldemort, and Other Villains: Essays on Evil in Popular Media, James Heit (ed.). Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 202–217. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. ———. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. ———. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. ———. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. ———. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. ———. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. London: Bloomsbury, 1998. ———. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Ruggiero, John. Hitler’s Enabler: Neville Chamberlain and the Origins of the Second World War. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015. Sehon, Scott. ‘The Soul in Harry Potter’. The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles, Gregory Bassham (ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010. 7–21. Smith, Anne Collins & Owen M. Smith. ‘Voldemort Tyrannos: Plato’s Tyrant in the Republic and the Wizarding World’. Reason Papers 34.1 (June 2012): 125–136. Smith, David. ‘Dumbledore Was Gay, J.K. Tells Amazed Fans’. The Guardian 21 October 2007. www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/oct/21/film.books Sterling-Folker, Jennifer & Brian Folker, ‘Conflict and the Nation-State: Magical Mirrors of Muggles and Refracted Images’. Harry Potter and International Relations, Daniel H. Nexon & Iver B. Neumann (eds.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 103–126. Steveker, Lena. ‘“Your Soul Is Whole, and Completely Your Own, Harry”: The Heroic Self in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series’. Heroism in the Harry Potter Series, Katrin Berndt & Lena Steveker (eds.). Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 69–81. Stojilkov, Andrea. ‘Life and Death in Harry Potter: The Immortality of Love and Soul’. Mosaic 48.2 (June 2015): 133–148. Tally, Robert T. ‘The Way of the Wizarding World: Harry Potter and the Magical Bildungsroman’. Harry Potter: A Casebook, Cynthia W. Hallett & Peggy J. Huey (eds.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 36–47. Wannamaker, Annette: ‘Men in Cloaks and High-heeled Boots, Men Wielding Pink Umbrellas: Witchy Masculinities in the Harry Potter Novels’. Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child. New York: Routledge, 2007. 121–146. Washick, James. ‘Oliver Twisted: The Origins of Lord Voldemort in the Dickensian Orphan’. Looking Glass 13.3 (2009): n.p. online. www.lib. latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/165/164 Westman, Karin E. ‘Specters of Thatcherism: Contemporary British Culture in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series’. The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon, Lana Whited (ed.). Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. 305–328.

226  Voldemort and the Limits of Dark Magic Williams, David Lay & Alan J. Kellner. ‘Dumbledore, Plato and the Lust for Power’. The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles. Gregory Bassham (ed.). 128–140. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010. Wolosky, Shira. The Riddles of Harry Potter: Secret Passages and Interpretive Quests. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Zipes, Jack. ‘The Phenomenon of Harry Potter, or Why All the Talk?’ Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. 170–189.

Conclusions

This book has aimed at calling attention to the neglected figure of the villain and at exploring the close connections between masculinity, patriarchy, and villainy. The reading I have offered here defends the idea that the villain should be considered a central element in a quintessential patriarchal cautionary tale against the dangers of accumulating excessive power. The villain’s unbounded sense of entitlement inspires him to commit a series of crimes, which require the intervention of the hero for the balance in the circle of hegemonic masculinity to be restored. Indeed, without the villain’s attempt to accrue as much power as possible in order to secure his full personal autonomy and liberation from the law, the hero would not even exist, for he would lack a function. The approach I have used is feminist, and I have focused exclusively on male villains with the avowed intention of exposing and criticizing patriarchy. I have argued, nonetheless, that as women access more power, thanks to the victories in the long, ongoing struggle for gender equality, villainy will cease being almost exclusively male. I have, however, disregarded the villainess for in her past and current representation she is, in my view, a product of patriarchal notions of power at odds with the feminist aim of undoing hierarchical social structures. Only in a truly post-sexist society could we really understand how gender and power intersect. It has been my purpose to offer, specifically, a critical analysis of the quite consistent discourse on the intersection we know better, that between masculinity and villainy, in order to argue that to properly understand patriarchy it is necessary to distinguish it from masculinity in general. The very similar characterization of the diverse villains I have analysed here suggests that patriarchal masculinity is a clearly identifiable type of masculinity, intensely focused on accumulating power for domination. This particular category of masculinity should not be, however, treated as the equivalent of all masculinity. Because of their aggressive drive, villains are exceptionally visible. The assumption that they represent all men, and even human nature, denies the existence of other types of masculinity, embraced by men who are not interested in power and who do not, hence, support patriarchy. The masculinity of the

228 Conclusions anti-patriarchal men has been often defined as alternative, but perhaps it should be the other way around: the villain’s patriarchal masculinity should be regarded as the problematic minority alternative to an essentially peace-loving majority masculinity. If villainous patriarchal masculinity were the norm, rather than the exception, the world would be in an even much worse state than it is today. The worst excesses of power have been and are being contested by anti-patriarchal persons, many of whom are men. As I hope to have demonstrated, the focus on the representation of the patriarchal villain in British fiction published between 1949 and 2018 is justified and productive. The decision to begin this volume with a chapter devoted to Adolf Hitler may seem controversial (at worst incoherent) but it has been my contention that English historian Ian Kershaw provides in his excellent biography a solid discussion of power, which is indispensable in any theorization of villainy. Like him, I defend the idea that evil is not a useful concept to fully understand how and why some men feel called to act on their sense of entitlement to power, to the last consequences. Unlike Kershaw, though, I have highlighted the fact that gender is an important factor to consider in relation to villainy for, so far, and as Hitler’s case proves, women’s lust for power has been contained as part of general sexism in ways that do not apply to men’s appetite for domination. Kershaw’s portrait of Hitler and the vast tragedy which this villain unleashed on the world provide us, therefore, with a definite measure of the worst behaviour that can be expected from a patriarchal man. Chapter 1 also explores other texts which dealt with Hitler during his lifetime. His access to power, based on his self-presentation as the true German hero, relied on an adroit use of the new 1920s and 1930s media by the Nazi apparatus. Hitler’s heroic public image, however, was contested by those who found him both ridiculous and dangerous, among them English feminist novelist Katherine Burdekin and English comedian Charles Chaplin. In the absence of a solid public discourse on villainy comparable to the one on heroism (except for Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the folk tale and for popular Anglophone fiction), Hitler initially benefitted from the confusion caused by his odd looks and behaviour, which explains why he was perceived to be a villain only after he started World War II. Following mainly Kershaw, I have upheld in this chapter the view that Hitler’s opportunistic conquest of power was facilitated by deep faults in the structure of German patriarchal society, a community which appears to have been fascinated by Hitler’s egotistic self-confidence until it became too late to control him. I have also highlighted the appeal of patriarchal power as the main reason why Nazi collective villainy was supported by so many German men and, despite Nazi pervading sexism, women.

Conclusions  229 In Chapter 2 I have discussed George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), reading this novel as a critical examination of the mechanism of coercion by which patriarchal power and masculinity reproduce themselves. Orwell has been the object of a thorough feminist critique, but I have followed the earlier work of Daphne Patai to focus on the negative view of masculinity that his masterpiece offers. It is often the case that male novelists who attack, as Orwell does, abusive power politics defend an anti-patriarchal discourse without presenting it overtly as such. On the basis of this assumption, I interpret the horrific dictatorial regime described in Nineteen Eighty-Four as an extreme instance of how patriarchy must apply violence to maintain its power, in view of the low appeal of its discourse and the challenge presented by the men who question it. Big Brother’s iconic presence is intended to diminish this potential male resistance to the regime he represents but, as Winston tragically learns, the brutal patriarchal system of power survives by using willing, privileged men like O’Brien to seduce and torture potential male dissidents. The supernatural, non-human, male villains Morgoth and Sauron, the centre of attention in Chapter 3, are key figures in J.R.R. Tolkien’s elaborate legendarium. Sauron, I have noted, may be a well-known figure, due to the popularity of The Lords of the Rings (1954–1955) and of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation, but he has not been sufficiently analysed. In my view, Sauron can only be fully appreciated in the context of his relationship with his master, Morgoth, and taking into consideration the diverse texts of The Silmarillion (1977, edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher). This volume narrates essentially the fall of the divine Valar known then as Melkor into abject villainy, his defeat as the renamed Morgoth, and the later rise of his lieutenant Sauron as the tyrant defeated in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was, no doubt, a conservative man who endorsed many patriarchal ideals. His portrait of Morgoth and of Sauron thus shows that patriarchy is a multilayered construction, ranging from a benevolent stratum (represented by Tolkien’s heroes, and the author himself) to the most negative branch (represented by the villains). Morgoth’s and Sauron’s immortality is used by Tolkien, therefore, to discuss from a benevolent, patriarchal point of view the problem of recurring villainy and to caution readers that, whereas specific villains may be defeated, villainy itself subsists, thus requiring the constant intervention of unselfish heroes (like the Hobbit Frodo and his helpers). In Chapter 4 I have opposed the habit of studying fantastic fiction apart from mimetic fiction to read Steerpike, Mervyn Peake’s unique villain, as an angry young man in the context of the eponymous British movement. It has been my contention that in his singular fantasy novels—Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959)—Peake participates of the same zeitgeist as the contemporary Angry Young Men, despite the many differences in their literary output.

230 Conclusions Peake even anticipates their response to the crisis of patriarchal authority in 1950s Britain with the rebellious Steerpike and the no less rebellious teen hero Titus Groan. However, whereas young Steerpike’s anger against the classism that denies meritocracy seems justified, which is why readers often sympathize with him, the anger that drives privileged Titus is quite problematic. He may reject his position as Gormenghast’s Earl out of disgust at the castle’s absurd rituals, but Titus’s anti-­patriarchal rebellion is, essentially, as selfish as Steerpike’s villainy and, as such, no solution for the many problems besetting the community which he simply abandons to its fate. The blurring of boundaries between hero and villain is also a primary facet of the James Bond series. The flamboyant villains presented in the twelve novels by Ian Fleming, all foreign men, often voice the author’s own critique of Bond’s British hegemonic masculinity. As Fleming hints through these iniquitous men, though, if Bonds knows how to fight villains this is because he is also a flawed man. Albeit stereotypically similar and equally interested in patriarchal power, each villain is distinctive; among them, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the focus of the chapter, stands out. Blofeld and Bond face each other in Thunderball (1961), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), and You Only Live Twice (1964) in a long confrontation that, despite the villain’s rather predictable elimination, undermines Bond’s heroism. While Blofeld’s physical appearance changes wildly while he descends into madness—and the novels into pulp—Bond’s role is increasingly questioned. The star MI6 agent fails to kill Blofeld’s partner Emilio Largo, shows a disloyal admiration for his father-in-law (a gangster) and, ultimately, destroys Blofeld seeking personal revenge rather than justice. The villain remains a larger-than-life patriarchal figure, despite his erratic characterization, but Bond ends up locked into solipsistic, anti-social violence, which seems hardly heroic. John le Carré’s post-Cold War representation of patriarchal villainy in his spy thrillers The Night Manager (1993) and The Constant Gardener (2000), the focus of Chapter 6, shows his concern with the deterioration of British honourability, caused by villainous upper-class British men. Le Carré’s heroic, gentlemanly amateur spies stand up to corrupt patriarchal, patrician fellow countrymen but also distance themselves from dubious heroes like Bond. Jonathan Pine fights arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper in The Night Manager, whereas Justin Quayle embarks on a crusade against the big pharmas in The Constant Gardener. However, as I have shown, le Carré builds their chivalrous male heroism on a problematic, sexist foundation: the death of a damsel in distress, who is herself qualified enough to play the role of hero. This is a fundamental weakness in le Carré’s romantic tales of British male heroism and villainy. On the other hand, his representation of villainy in The Constant Gardener as a network of patriarchal men running Government and corporate business, instead of as a single villainous figure, offers,

Conclusions  231 arguably, a more realistic model of how power really works and a model for future fiction by le Carré himself or others. In Michael Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart trilogy, the subject of Chapter 7, the author, an English political novelist with a long experience as a Tory politician, warns readers about the danger that democracy might empower a patriarchal villain (as happened, indeed, with Adolf Hitler) if only for a limited mandate. His trilogy about Scottish upper-class schemer Francis Urquhart, composed by House of Cards (1990), To Play the King (1993), and The Final Cut (1995)—successfully adapted by the BBC (1990–1995) and by Netflix (2013–2019)—was, as I have noted, directly inspired by controversial PM Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990). As happens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, patriarchal masculinity plays a major role in the story of Urquhart’s rise and fall, although the author has no explicit gender issues agenda. Using a variety of heroes— from feminist journalist Mattie Storin to the newly crowned sensitive British monarch—Dobbs examines along the three novels the many secret emotional vulnerabilities that plague Urquhart as a man even after holding office successfully as Prime Minister for a decade, and his fear of being exposed as a villain in life or after death. Ageing, decadent Urquhart may elicit some sympathy despite his Machiavellian style in politics, but Dobbs’s trilogy sends, above all, a serious message about the need to control self-empowering villains like him and, generally, all individuals who seek power at any cost. Chapter 8 has focused on Edinburgh gangster Morris Big Ger ­Cafferty, a central character in Ian Rankin’s ongoing series about Detective John Rebus (started in 1987). Cafferty’s presence has been gradually increasing in the series to the point that, as I have defended here, this villain can be now categorized as a major protagonist next to Rebus. Considering all the novels in which Cafferty appears up to 2018, I have analysed his still open narrative arc, reading it as Rankin’s reflection on the limitations of the law to prevent gangsters like Big Ger from conquering (illegal) power. Cafferty’s position, however, is always unstable: he must fight the law, embodied by Rebus, but also, as he ages, a series of ambitious young upstarts who claim his patriarchal throne. Rebus, I have noted, must eventually accept mandatory retirement, which places him in an awkward position as civilian amateur investigator; gangsters, however, do not retire. Each victory revitalizes Cafferty and increases his power, thus undermining the law. Without perhaps being fully aware, Rankin is, thus, if not directly siding with Cafferty at least seriously weakening the role of Rebus as an effective hero, transforming him into a demoralized witness of Cafferty’s success. Finally, Chapter 9 has dealt with the only woman author I have considered here, J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter series (1997–2007), which I have read as political fiction for young readers about how to protect society from a fascist dictator, reverses the increasing pessimism

232 Conclusions of Rowling’s male British peers. In my view, Rowling’s heptalogy sends two main messages. One refers to how the villain’s empowerment by using dark magic must necessarily result in Voldemort’s loss of his fragmented human soul and the degradation of his once attractive physical appearance. Rowling repeats in this way the classic lesson, repeated in countless cautionary stories, about the inevitable connection between the moral and the physical monstrosity of the villain. Her other message, which is more innovative, alludes to the type of masculinity represented by the hero Harry Potter. Although Rowling toys with the impression that Voldemort and Harry are somehow connected, she ultimately makes the point that the boy hero qualifies to defeat the villain because he is, as a man, as different as possible from the Dark Lord. Whereas his lust for power absolutely destroys Voldemort, Harry is always a dutiful hero who shows no interest in power. His actions are performed in a spirit of civic responsibility towards his community of friends and peers, and with no expectation of reward (or, indeed, survival). Rowling renews in this way the patriarchal tale of villainy by emphasising the self-destructiveness of power in the case of the villain and by offering a new hero with Harry who, though obviously masculine, is not at all a patriarchal man. If, as I hope, the theorization here offered of the patriarchal villain as an expression of excessive power is solid enough, it could be applied to other instances of villainy beyond British (and American) territory— and beyond masculinity. Vikram Chandra’s superb novel Sacred Games (2006), set in India, appears to be an optimal choice to investigate how patriarchy functions as a transnational system of domination, expressed, at the same time, in national glocal terms. As regards women, Suzanne Collins’s villainess Alma Coin in The Hunger Games (2008–2010) offers a highly relevant example of post-sexist villainy, that is, of an excessive female empowerment in a future context with no gender discrimination. Coin and similar female characters in fantasy and science fiction can offer important insights into how, unless it is restrained soon, patriarchy might evolve into an enticing choice for women with a strong sense of entitlement to power—as it is for men of the same disposition. There are, no doubt, thousands of other fictional representations of the villain awaiting analysis from the anti-patriarchal standpoint I have defended here, though it is my personal wish that authors and readers may see the importance of telling new stories in which heroes (male or female) would not be necessary because the villain has disappeared, together with patriarchy and all lusting after power. This proposal possibly sounds not too exciting but, surely, it is about time the human species starts enjoying a peaceful, serene life, and other fictions.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. 1984 (film) see Orwell Amis, Kingsley 89, 91, 106, 125n2; Lucky Jim 90; New Maps of Hell 85 Angry Young Men see Peake Anti-patriarchal Studies 2; see also Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities; Masculinities Studies Arendt, Hannah see evil, Rowling Austin Powers (film franchise) Dr. Evil 126n7 Bainbridge, Beryl Young Adolf 38n2 Balzac, Honoré de The Black Sheep 5 Benson, Raymond see Fleming Berger, John 102n8 Beria, Lavrentiy 106 Bierce, Ambrose 122 Blair, Tony 166, 198n6, 198n9, 221n4 Block, Lawrence see Rankin Brazil (film) see Orwell Brontë, Anne The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 3; Arthur Huntingdon 3 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre 4; Rochester 4 Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights 4; Heathcliff 4 Brophy, Brigid 102n8 Boucicault, Dion 4 Braine, John Room at the Top 91 Buck Rogers (comic strip series) 27 Burnham, James see Orwell Burke, Edmund 6, 180; A Philosophical Enquiry on the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful 6 Burdekin, Katherine 20, 228; Swastika Night 20–21; see also Orwell

Burgess, Anthony 1985 42, 47, 48, 58n7; A Clockwork Orange 91, 92 Byron, Lord (George Gordon Byron) 4 Campbell, Joseph 24, 66; The Hero with a Thousand Faces 24 Captain America 27 Chamberlain, Houston 23 Chamberlain, Neville see Rowling Chandra, Vikram Sacred Games 232 charismatic leadership 28, 111, 155, 211; Max Weber 28 Churchill, Winston 162 CIA 108, 120, 134 Cold War 12, 20, 38n7, 43, 106, 110, 112, 129–130, 133, 134, 136, 137, 149n7, 230 colonialism (British) 13; see also le Carré, The Constant Gardener Collins, Suzanne The Hunger Games (trilogy) 232; Alma Coin 232 Collins, Wilkie 4, 26; Count Fosco 26 Communism 20, 29, 38n7, 42, 105, 108, 113, 130, 135, 203; see also Stalin Confessions of a Nazi Spy (film) 25 Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities 2; see also AntiPatriarchal Studies; Masculinities Studies Delillo, Don Falling Man 214–215, 222n11 Dennis, Nigel 102n8 Devil (religious figure) 24, 67, 109; see also morality plays Diamonds Are Forever (film) 126n7 Dickens, Charles 4, 132–133; Bleak House 88; David Copperfield

234 Index 94–95; Dickensian villain 3; Oliver Twist 209; Uriah Heep (character) 95 Dobbs, Michael 12, 13, 178, 231; Anderson, Ian 154; Davies, Andrew 153, 154, 161, 170, 172n3, 174n12; The Final Cut (BBC mini-series) 153, 154; The Final Cut (novel) 154, 167–172, 172n3, 173n9, 231; House of Cards (BBC trilogy series) 171, 172n1, 231; House of Cards (BBC mini-series) 153, 155, 161; House of Cards (Netflix series) 153, 172n1, 172n3, 174n13, 231; House of Cards (novel) 153, 157–163, 166, 167, 168, 172n3, 172n4, 231; House of Cards (novel trilogy) 12, 155, 173n7; Shaw, George Bernard The Apple Cart 173n6; Thatcher, Margaret 154–156, 159, 162, 166–168, 171; To Play the King (BBC mini-series) 153, 163, 164, 166; To Play the King (novel) 153, 158, 163–166, 171, 172n3, 173n6, 231; see also feminism; hero Doyle, Arthur Conan ‘The Final Problem’ 26–27; Moriarty 26–27, 38n13 Durrell, Lawrence 102n8 Elizabeth II 13, 124 Empire (British) 13, 121; see also Fleming You Only Live Twice; le Carré, The Constant Gardener empowerment see villainy Englishness 88, 107, 131, 134 entitlement to power (sense of) 2, 7, 9–10, 227, 228, 232; Hitler 20, 24, 28, 30–33, 35, 37; le Carré 137; Orwell 49; Peake 92, 94, 95; Rankin 184, 193; Rowling 207, 208, 209, 210; Tolkien 63, 68, 73–74, 76, 78, 79, 81; see also villainy evil 1–2, 5–9, 10, 11, 14n3, 14n9, 14n10, 24, 26, 228; Arendt (banality of evil) 32–33, 51; evil laughter 14n8; Fleming 109–110, 122, 123; Hitler 19, 28, 30–31; le Carré 134, 135, 139, 147; Peake 93–94; Rankin 180; Rowling 207, 209, 215–216, 220, 221n6; see also villainy

fascism (ideology) 12, 203, 220, 221n2; Fascism (historical) 20, 35, 42 feminism 7, 8, 9–11, 15n12, 45, 173n5, 227; anti-feminism 44, 14n9, 156; British feminist authors 20–21; Dobbs 162–163, 231; Orwell 44–46; pro-feminist 8; Tolkien 64–65; see also patriarchy femme fatale see villainess Flash Gordon (comic strip series) 27 Fleming, Ian 12, 230; Benson, Raymond ‘Blast from the Past’ 126n10; Casino Royale 135, 109, 117; Dr. No 106, 107, 108, 110; From Russia with Love 108–109; Live and Let Die 110; The Man with the Golden Gun 124; Moonraker 108, 110; On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (film) 126n7; On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (novel) 106, 113, 116–119, 230; other James Bond authors 125n2; The Spy Who Loved Me 119, 124–125; Thunderball (film) 125n5, 126n7, 126n8; Thunderball (novel) 106, 111–116, 118, 230; You Only Live Twice (film) 126n7; You Only Live Twice (novel) 106, 109, 113, 119–124, 126n10, 230; see also entitlement to power; evil, hero; le Carré For Your Eyes Only (film) 126n7 Fowles, John 102n8 Frankenstein (novel) 4; Frankenstein (character) 228 Frazer, Sir James George The Golden Bough 24 Freud, Sigmund Civilization and Its Discontents 6–7 George, Lloyd 162, 166 Golding, William 81n5, 102n8; Lord of the Flies 92, ‘Envoy Extraordinary’ 101n2 Gothic 53, 218; Gothic fiction 3, 4, 122; Gothic villain 121; Gothic villainy 102n11 Greene, Grahame 91; Brighton Rock 92; see also Peake Hansen, Ron Hitler’s Niece 38n2 Hearn, Lafcadio 122

Index  235 Heartfield, John 38n7 Heller, Joseph 82n5 hero 1–3, 4, 6, 24–25, 93, 149n7, 227; Dobbs 156, 157, 160–162, 173n3; Fleming 105, 109–110, 111, 115–116, 117, 119, 122, 124, 230; heroic gentlemanliness 146; heroism 5, 13, 19, 20, 24, 27; le Carré 130–131, 133, 136, 139, 143, 147–148, 230; Peake 88, 94, 100–101, 230; Rankin 196, 197, 198n2, 231; Rowling 12, 204, 207, 209, 215, 218, 220, 221n5, 232; Tolkien 63, 64, 65, 67, 69 heroism see hero; Hitler Hitler, Adolf: anti-Semitism 31, 34; Braun, Eva 36; Chaplin, Charles The Great Dictator (film) 25–26, 38n10, 38n11, 38n12, 228; Eichmann, Adolf 32; Elser, Georg 31; Goebbels, Joseph 29, 35; heroism (German) 18–20, 24, 28, 228; heroism (Wagnerian) 24; Heydrich, Reinhard 32, 35; Himmler, Heinrich 35; Hindenburg, Paul 29; Hoffmann, Heinrich 22; looks 20–23; Mein Kampf 23, 29–31, 48; return (fictions) 221n3; Riefenstahl, Leni 22, 38n6; Röhm, Ernst 29, 38n14; Stalin, Joseph 27, 30–33, 37, 38n1; Valkyrie Operation 31; Wagner, Richard 23, 28; see also Burdekin; charismatic leadership; entitlement to power; evil; Kershaw; Nazism; Orwell; Peake; Rowling; Tolkien Hitler, Beast of Berlin (film) 25 Hogg, James The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 178–179 Holocaust 20, 31–37, 206; see also Nazism House of Cards (BBC trilogy series) see Dobbs House of Cards (Netflix series) see Dobbs Huxley, Aldous Brave New World see Orwell Jackson, Peter see Tolkien Kershaw, Ian 2, 18–20, 111, 214, 228; Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris 2, 18,

19, 22, 23, 28, 29, 34, 35; Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis 2, 18, 19, 30, 34; ‘Hitler Myth’ 18, 19, 26, 28–37 knighthood (code) 65; knighthood (title) 13, 124, 144, 160 Khrushchev, Nikita 106, 121 Kim, Jong-Un 22 Larkin, Phillip Jill 91 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Lucien Ducasse) 122 le Carré, John 12, 13, 230–231; The Constant Gardener (film) 149n11; The Constant Gardener (novel) 12, 13, 130–132, 139–147, 148n4, 149n11, 230; Fleming, Ian 129–131, 132, 133, 134, 135; The Honourable Schoolboy 129; Karla (character) 129–130, 134, 148n2; A Legacy of Spies 129; The Night Manager (BBC mini–series) 148n6, 149n7; The Night Manager (novel) 12, 130–131, 133–139, 141, 149n7, 222n17; 230; The Pigeon Tunnel 148n1; The Secret Pilgrim 130; Smiley’s People 129; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 129; see also entitlement to power; evil; hero Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 122 Levin, Ira The Boys from Brazil 221n3 Lewis, C.S. 64, 102n8 Lönrot, Elias Kalevala 81n3 Look Who’s Back! (Er Ist Wieder) (novel, film) 221n3 Machiavelli, Niccolò The Prince 157, 173n8, 173n9; Machiavellian villain 4 Major, John 154, 155, 173n10, 174n12 Mailer, Norman The Castle in the Forest 38n2 masculinity 2, 7–10, 15n12, 37, 46–47, 61, 65, 101, 105–106, 136, 156, 164, 179, 184, 190, 204, 207, 216, 220, 227–228, 229, 232; alternative masculinity 10, 46, 216; angry masculinity 91–92; anti-patriarchal masculinity 207, 216; British masculinity 13, 105, 116; English masculinity 135–136; gentlemanliness 146; hard-boiled masculinity 179; hegemonic

236 Index masculinity 9–10, 47, 204, 227, 230; heroic masculinity 131; Orwell 43–47; patriarchal masculinity 6, 9–10, 47, 67, 74, 91, 92, 157, 184, 193, 197, 227, 228, 231; Peake 90–91; Tolkien 61–67; Rowling 204–207; see also patriarchy Masculinities Studies 9; see also Antipatriarchal Studies; Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities May, Theresa 156, 199n15 McIlvanney, William The Big Man 179; Laidlaw 179; The Papers of Tony Veitch 179 McInnes, Colin 91 melodrama 56, 123, 146, 191; for the stage 4, 14n7; The Perils of Pauline (cinema series) 14n8 MI6 107, 111, 114, 117–120, 124, 125n4, 130–135, 137, 142, 148n1, 230 Milton, John Paradise Lost 4, 68 Mill, J.S. The Subjection of Women 132 morality 5–7, 10, 34, 109, 132, 140, 159, 173n5, 216 morality plays 3, 4, 172n1; Devil (character) 3; Vice (character) 3, 4, 172n1 Moi, Daniel Arap 140, 141, 142 Morgan, Richard K. 220 Morris, William Völsung saga 81n3; A Tale of the House of the Wolfings 81n3 Murdoch, Iris 91 Mussolini, Benito 23, 27, 134, 203 Nazism 2, 25, 32, 36, 56, 203; anti-Semitism 31, 34, 50, 205; Endlösung (Final Solution) 31, 34–35; Lebensraum 29, 31; mass extermination (non-Jewish citizens) 35; Nazi Party 23, 31, 32, 36, 38n14; women 35–37; see also Hitler Never Say Never Again (film) 126n7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 11, 107, 112, 123, 206; Beyond Good and Evil 11 organized crime 12, 177–180, 181, 184, 194 Orwell, George 12, 21, 81n5, 132, 229, 231; 1984 (film) 58n3; Big Brother 12, 42–46, 47–51, 52, 56–57, 80, 229; Brazil (film) 58n3;

Burdekin, Katherine Swastika Night 44, 48, 49, 58n5, 58n6; Burnham, James 58n8; Hitler, Adolf Mein Kampf (review) 48; Homage to Catalonia 43; Huxley, Aldous Brave New World 44, 45, 56; Nineteen Eighty-Four (novel) 12, 13, 42–60, 229, 231; Nineteen Eighty–Four (teleplay) 43, 58n2; O’Brien 12, 42–47, 49, 50, 51–58, 229; Orwellian 33, 74, 80; satire 42–43; Zamyatin, Yevgeny We 44, 45, 48–49, 53, 58n4; see also entitlement to power; feminism Osborne, John 89; Look Back in Anger 90; Jimmy Porter 91 patriarchy 1–2, 7–10, 11, 13, 21, 27, 31, 33, 35, 37, 46–47, 48, 51–52, 58, 62, 65, 93, 101, 105, 108, 133, 147, 183, 227, 229, 232; antipatriarchal 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 44, 45, 46, 78, 92, 99, 115, 133, 207, 26, 228, 229, 230, 232; benevolent patriarchy 12, 204; German 30; in prehistory 15n11; women 35–37; see also entitlement to power; evil; feminism; masculinity; villainy Peake, Mervyn 12, 81n5, 229–230; Angry Young Men 90–94; BergenBelsen 87, 89, 94; Boy in Darkness 86, 87, 101n2, 102n13; Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor 86; Gormenghast (BBC adaptation) 102n12; Gormenghast (novel) 12, 85, 87, 89, 98–101, 229–230; Greene, Grahame 102n7; Hitler, Adolf (exhibition) 87–88; Mr. Pye 86; Titus Alone 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 101n3, 229–230; Titus Groan 12, 85, 86, 87, 89 94–98, 102n7, 229–230; The Wit to Woo 86; WWII 86; see also entitlement to power; evil; hero Picture of Dorian Gray, The 4 Poe, Edgar Allan 122 power 2, 4–6, 7–11, 19–20, 22, 24, 28, 30–33, 35, 37, 42, 46, 47, 49, 51–53, 56–57, 58n8, 62–69, 73–78, 79, 92, 94, 97, 101, 108–109, 110, 121, 155–157, 162, 166, 171–172, 177, 183, 184, 190, 197, 206–208, 214, 220, 221n6, 227–232; see also entitlement to power; villainy

Index  237 Prince of Wales (Charles Windsor) 174n12 Princess of Wales (Lady Diana Spencer) 164, 174n12 Propp, Vladimir Morphology of the Folk Tale 24–25, 228 race 38n12; anti-racism 206; racism 37, 147–148, 202, 205 Radcliffe, Ann 4, 26; Schedoni 26 Rankin, Ian 12, 231; Black & Blue 182–183; The Black Book 178, 180–181, 198n3; Block, Lawrence 179; Even Dogs in the Wild 177, 190, 191–193; Exit Music 177, 181, 190–191, 196, 198n11; Fleshmarket Close 187–188; The Hanging Garden 183–185; In a House of Lies 191, 196–197; Knots & Crosses 197n1; Let it Bleed 178; Mortal Causes 182; The Naming of the Dead 188–190; Rather Be the Devil 194–195, 199n12; Resurrection Men 177, 186–187; Saints of the Shadow Bible 190, 191, 195, 199n13; Set in Darkness 185–186; Standing in Another Man’s Grave 190, 191–193; Stevenson, R.L. 178–179; Tooth & Nail 180; true crime 189–190; see also entitlement to power; evil; hero Rhys, Jean 20 Rohmer, Sax ‘Fu Manchu’ series 26, 27, 106, 133; Fu Manchu 13, 25; The Drums of Fu Manchu 27 Rowling, J.K. 1, 2, 12, 13, 231–232; Arendt, Hannah (banality of evil) 214; Chamberlain, Neville 203; Fantastic Beasts (film series) 222n9, 222n15; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 205, 211, 215; Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (play) 221n7; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (film) 221n8; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 208, 211, 216, 218; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (novel) 202, 212, 213, 219; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 201, 210, 215, 217, 219; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 205; Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone 2, 205, 213, 217, 219, 221n1; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of

Azkaban 213, 215; Hitler, Adolf 203–205, 211, 214, 221n3; The Tales of Beedle the Bard 207; Tolkien, J.R.R. 75, 82n10, 204, 205, 209; Thatcher, Margaret 221n4; see also entitlement to power; evil; hero Sade, Marquis de (Donatien Alphonse François) 122 Scalzi, John 220 Scotland 156, 178, 180, 184–186, 189, 191, 197; Devolution 198n5, 198n6; independence 186, 198n8; Scottishness 107, 157, 178, 184 Selvon, Sam 91 sexuality 11, 22, 99, 107–108, 114, 115, 129, 166, 218; asexuality 108, 114; bisexuality 108; heterosexuality 10; homosexuality 54, 105; homophobia 45, 54, 184; lesbophobia 108 Shakespeare, William 1, 4, 33; Julius Caesar 167, 173n7; Macbeth 33; Othello 4; Richard III 3, 33, 157, 172n1, 173n8; The Taming of the Shrew 47 Shaw, George Bernard see Dobbs Sillitoe, Alan Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 91 SMERSH 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112 Snow, C.P. 91 Spark, Muriel 91 Spectre (film) 126n7 Spinrad, Norman The Iron Dream 38n1 Stalin, Joseph 3, 18, 48, 56, 106, 110; Stalinism 56; see also Hitler Star Wars (franchise) 216; Anakin Skywalker 216; Darth Vader 216; Luke Skywalker 216 Steiner, George The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. 38n2, 221n3 Stevenson, R.L see Rankin Stoker, Bram 122; Dracula (novel) 4, 76; Dracula (character) 3, 26, 77, 113 Superman (comic strip character) 25, 27 terrorism 110–111, 215; biological warfare 116, 118, 126n9; masculinity 8; nationalist terrorism 182; nuclear terrorism 107, 114; see also Delillo

238 Index Thatcher, Margaret 10, 173n5; The Downing Street Years 155, 167; Thatcherism 156–157; see also Dobbs; Rowling Tolkien, Christopher 61, 64, 81n2, 81n4, 229 Tolkien, J.R.R. 12, 85, 88, 102n8, 205, 229; ‘Ainulindalë’ 67–69; ‘Akallabêth’ 68, 73, 74–75; Catholicism 63, 67, 222n13; The Fellowship of the Ring 62, 76–78, 79; Hitler, Adolf 63–64, 74; The Hobbit 62, 67, 75, 76; Jackson, Peter 61, 75, 79, 229; The Lord of the Rings 12, 61–62, 67, 75, 76, 88, 102n8, 205, 217, 229; ‘The Music of the Ainur’ 68, 81n4; ‘Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age’ 68, 73–74, 75; ‘Quenta Silmarillion’ 68, 70–72, 82n8; The Return of the King 62, 78–81; The Silmarillion 12, 61–62, 64, 65, 67, 71, 229; The Two Towers 62, 78; ‘Valaquenta’ 68, 69–70; Wagner, Richard Nibelungenlied 66; WWI 63–64, 81n5; see also entitlement to power; evil; feminism; hero Trocchi, Alexander Young Adam 91 Trump, Donald 221n2 United States 8, 26, 52, 111, 118, 121, 157, 174, 177, 221n2, 222n13 USSR 43, 108, 109, 133; Soviet Union 27, 30, 38n1, 48, 106, 108, 121, 137 Vice (character) see morality plays villainess 11, 108–109, 227; femme fatale 11, 144; see also villainy villainy 1–2, 7, 10, 12–13, 24, 27, 31, 33–34, 42, 47, 69, 73, 78, 106, 132–133, 138, 140–142,

148, 157, 164, 171, 197, 204, 229–232; American 2; British 2, 13; charismatic 28; class 3, 22, 91, 130–132, 134, 160, 178, 181, 209–210, 230, 231; collective 32, 25, 51, 228; definitions 5–6; English Literature 4; empowerment 1–2, 7–11, 19–20, 22, 28, 34, 37, 64, 76, 94, 197, 207, 220, 232; etymology 3; genius 5, 24, 26, 110, 113, 123; patriarchal 13, 33, 47, 81, 109, 117, 131, 140, 146–147, 157, 163, 164, 204, 206–207, 218, 220, 230; popular fictions 2, 4–5; recurrence 62–63, 67; scars 125n3; Shakespearean 32–33; torture 44, 49, 51, 53–57, 105, 107, 116, 125n4, 142, 212, 222n10, 229; villain-hero 4, 160, 218; see also entitlement to power; evil; Gothic; hero; Machiavelli; masculinity; patriarchy; power; villainess Vonnegut, Kurt 82n5 Wagner, Richard see Hitler, Tolkien Waugh, Evelyn 91 Webster, John 4 White, T.H. 102n8 Wilson, Angus 91 Williams, Charles 64 Wyndham, John ‘Consider her Ways’ 101n2 Woolf, Virginia 20 World War I 63; WWI 25, 30, 36, 63–64, 89, 203; see also Tolkien World War II 228; WWII 1, 21, 27, 36, 42, 64, 86, 89, 107, 113, 114, 115, 119, 158, 210, 221n4; post– WWII 1, 148n4; pre–WWII (fiction) 13; see also Peake Zamyatin, Yevgeny We see Orwell