Session 7: Villains vs. Criminals

3rd Global Conference

Saturday 10th September – Monday 12th September 2011

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Villains But No Criminals?! Selected Villains in Fantasy Fiction for Children and Young Adults
Karin Kokorski
Institute for English and American Studies, University of Osnabrück, Germany

Heroes and villains in fantasy literature for children and young adults are supposed to form simple dichotomies: heroes are inherently good, villains are inherently evil. As readers we assume that being the villain in a novel also means being a criminal. What happens, however, if this clear cut scheme does not necessarily apply for the “bad guys”? How do we determine if the villain is the villain if he or she is not breaking any laws, but instead creating the laws? The White Witch from Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Church in Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter series are prime examples for this: they hold the monopoly on power and hence are in charge of the law of the state. As the villains do not need to fear any consequences, they abuse their power to commit unforgivable crimes, which marks them as being evil and thus threaten harmonious, well functioning societies. Here, the author heavily relies on the reader’s understanding of just actions in contrast to lawful actions. The reader’s moral code guides him or her through the stories and demands justice, demands the villains to be punished, and keeps alive the reader’s fascination with the turn of events.

Defeating the state is one of the hardest tasks to do for child heroes. They have to oppose a double threat: not only do they have to fight against adult power, but also against legal authority. Their moral compass, knowledge of “doing the right thing,” and their willingness to overtly fight a rotten system marks them as true heroes.

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Visualising Villains: Crafting Criminals in Australian Crime Fiction
Rachel Franks
CQUniversity, Rockhampton, Australia

In Miles Franklin’s Bring the Monkey (1933) Ercildoun Carrington states: ‘I’ve always loathed murder’ (p. 1) and in Elizabeth Antill’s Death on the Barrier Reef (1952) Sergeant Bull squints out to sea and remarks: ‘never been able to find an adequate reason for murder myself’ (p. 195). Of course readers of crime fiction usually have no objection to murders taking place and authors have found numerous reasons for one person to kill another because a body is an essential plot device for a murder mystery. Readers also have the capacity, however, to engage with murder in ways that exceed its function as a mechanism to define a piece of fiction as crime fiction. This paper explores, with a focus on Australian texts, some of the ethical questions attendant on the act of murder in crime fiction and thus serves to give the genre an importance beyond mere entertainment. These questions are highlighted through a discussion of some of the creative processes involved in crafting characters that commit criminal acts and a brief examination of how some murderers become heroes and others villains. The traditional setting, for many crime stories, is a black and white world: a place where the demarcation between good and evil is clearly understood. This paper asks if readers can be forced into a world dominated by shades of grey, where they are compelled to explore their own ideas about the value of a human life and the conditions that would be necessary to justify committing murder for the perceived greater good.

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The Joycean Hero as Treacherous Villain in Coetzee’s Summertime (2009)
Fabricio Tocco
Universitat de Barcelona, Université Paris VII – Denis Diderot, Université Paris IV – Sorbonne, France

In J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009), we can read the portrayal of an eponymous writer which is seen by his social milieu as a treacherous villain: John Coetzee shares this ambiguity along with Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “The Dead”. They both live in the former periphery of the British Empire, which is depicted as an Anglophobic political and linguistic community. Whilst John Coetzee teaches English language and literature in high schools of his native South Africa, after a sojourn in England and the United States; Gabriel Conroy writes for a newspaper in favour of maintaining Union with Great Britain and prefers spending his holidays in Continental Europe instead of Galway. They both are Anglophiles writers who are oblivious of the dominant but minority languages of their environment (Gaelic and Afrikaans) and its cultural nationalism. We can perceive to what extent cosmopolitanism is seen as a political and literary treachery by the writer’s social milieu. Boers and Dubliners are portrayed as reluctant to English language and literature, which is embodied by the villainous writers. Both Coetzee and Conroy are examples of an individual identity which is portrayed as a political oxymoron of a particular nationalist identity. Nevertheless, even if the interviewees in Summertime talk more about themselves than about John Coetzee, it is the Nobel Prize writer who strengthen the cohesive whole that justifies the fake memoir. Similarly, even if Conroy is seen by his family as an anti-patriotic figure, he is portrayed as the enlightened and universal writer. We will argue to what extent, despite the apparent depiction of both characters as villains, we still can state that they are the heroes of the story, since they are also its main subject and its dominant voice.