Give Opposition a Worldview

A villain whose position can be dismissed in a sentence cannot cost the protagonist anything, and when the protagonist wins, it is a walkover. Too often the villain is an obstacle, or proof of the hero’s virtue, or simply the plot’s way of delaying the ending.

Milton announces his purpose in Book 1 of Paradise Lost: to “justify the ways of God to men” (line 26). The first character to speak is the enemy of that purpose. Satan, who has lost a war in Heaven, lies on a lake of fire, and when he can stand he gives his ally Beelzebub the argument under his defiance. Of God he says that whoever “now is sovereign can dispose and bid / What shall be right,” though reason makes him only an equal and force made him supreme. His answer is “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” and “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (lines 246-263; spelling modernized). Anyone who has resented an authority knows the tone.

Alone on a mountain in sight of Eden, in Book 4, Satan argues with himself. He concedes that God “deserved no such return,” and asks of his own fall, “whom hast thou then or what to accuse, / But Heaven’s free love dealt equally to all?” He weighs repenting and rejects it, predicting his own relapse: “Ease would recant / Vows made in pain.” He ends: “Evil, be thou my good” (lines 42-110).

Milton’s narrator, after Satan’s first speech in Book 1, describes him as speaking “Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair” (lines 125-126). Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93) that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” The page cannot settle that. It does show an author who set out to justify God and gave the other side arguments strong enough for a reader like Blake to take them for his sympathies.

An antagonist with a worldview holds a rival account of how things are and what matters, one that can be stated, that fits much of what the story’s world shows, and that makes the protagonist’s own position more expensive to hold. She needn’t be sympathetic or victorious, and you needn’t agree with her. The reader, listening, has to feel the pull, and the protagonist has to have something to answer.

Weak opposition gives a win by default; a protagonist’s values are only demonstrated against force that could plausibly overturn them. A persuasive antagonist also gives the reader’s own doubts an advocate on the page, so that when the protagonist answers, she answers the reader’s objection too. Milton seems to build this in. Satan’s speeches are the objection to the poem’s thesis, and the poem lets the logic run until its cost shows. The Satan of Book 1 says the mind is its own place; the Satan of Book 4 says “myself am Hell” (line 75).

Persuasive is not the same as fully explained. Iago tells Roderigo “I hate the Moor,” then, alone, adds a rumor that Othello has slept with his wife: “I know not if ’t be true, / But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, / Will do as if for surety” (Act 1, scene 3). Coleridge, in a note on the speech, called it “the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity,” and in an entry in Omniana (1812) wrote that Iago’s changing motives were fictions of a restless nature haunted by the love of exerting power. Iago works because his logic is a performance whose engine we cannot fully see.

Some opposition is not a person at all but a bureaucracy, a diagnosis, a sea, and then the question is one about rules. A bureaucracy has procedures that make sense from inside, and its menace lives there.

Practice. Write the antagonist’s argument in its strongest form: about two hundred words, in the first person, addressed to a friend rather than to the protagonist, with no adjectives of villainy. Include one true observation about the story’s world that the protagonist’s side cannot easily answer. Read it as the antagonist’s ally and mark the weakest claim, which is where the protagonist’s opening lies. Put one sentence of the argument, undisguised, into a scene. In nonfiction, do the same for the opposing view in terms its advocates would recognize (74). Then cut that sentence and reread the scene, the whole exercise taking forty minutes; if the scene reads the same, the worldview has not yet reached the protagonist.