“Agamemnon is an asshole.”

Bad Characters, Bad Language, Bad Reading

Eighteen-plus years later, and of all the opening lines a student ever handed in to me, this is still my favorite.

I was a graduate teaching fellow, leading a course on ancient and medieval European literature. Having just begun the Iliad, I told the class to write up a short analysis of the squabbling characters from Book 1. Most of the papers waffled into their arguments, as introductions in student writing tend to do. But not this young woman’s— “Agamemnon is an asshole.” Equivocation be damned; she got right to the point.

She’s not completely off base either. Perhaps no truer words have been uttered about the Argive commander. Agamemnon truly is an asshole—as well as a jerk and a dick and all the other bad names he’s been called. But while theses assessments are not inaccurate, they are nonetheless, as anyone who’s ever been to school knows, incorrect. And for good reason. You just can’t talk like this in a paper.

Decorum may be the most superficial rationale for speaking one way or another, but it’s also the most immediately consequential. If an author uses a bad word in The New Yorker, readers are going to give them the benefit of the doubt. But when you’re a nobody—like a student—saying things the wrong way often provokes others to dismiss the entirety of your work, including any good ideas lurking therein. This kind of window dressing is just a fact of life, and we encounter it in one form or another all the time. (If you really believe in a benevolent Christian God, why would you think that wearing old sneakers to church would offend Him? Nuts, right? Not to my mom it wasn’t.)

I don’t mind students taking risks. I will look past some indelicate wording if the paper is trying to get somewhere. But in this instance, the opening line was also its concluding argument. The paper never really goes beyond calling Agamemnon a bad person—not a villain, mind you, but a bad person. Which is to say, he got treated the way we so often treat people we don’t like—we dismiss them, with all their motivations and concerns, avant la lettre and outright.

Ah, silly student. She was just a kid. I’m sure she has since learnt not to treat characters like people. Alas, in the years that would follow, committing this classic lit class fallacy would become prevalent, not just among students, but among professionals too.

A recent article in Persuasion reports that literary magazines are censoring writers for having the audacity to treat their characters like works of art. In the latest transgression, an editor pulled publication of a story which rewrites The Lone Ranger from the perspective of the hero’s condescended Native American sidekick, Tonto. You’d think this would be not just acceptable, but commendable. But because in the story Tonto says things like “Me not happy,” which of course comes from the original, the editor argued that the story put forward a “problematic depiction of Indigenous peoples.”

I thought we were done cancelling Shakespeare and Dante and anyone else whose historical worldviews clash with our own. The first thing you learn in literary study—or at least, I once learnt, and have always taught—is not to conflate an author with their artwork and a real person with a fictional character. And probably the second thing you learn, is that being problematic isn’t a problem at all.

Since at least Aristotle we’ve understood that stories allow us to vicariously wrestle with weighty, meaty issues. That was what tragedy was all about. It gave you the chance to confront the kinds of debilitating emotional and ethical dilemmas that come with betrayal, violence, and self-sabotage, all from the relative safety of your neighborhood amphitheater. All stories are problematic whenever they present us with challenging situations. And it’s a good thing. The challenges literature poses are forms of engagement—we consider a character’s dilemmas, imagine what we would do in their circumstances. As scholars with an evolutionary bent put it—fiction is rehearsal for life.

This doesn’t mean that all fiction is by its very fictional nature ethical. I don’t buy that nonsense at all. What it means is that there are starting points and concluding arguments and woe unto us for necessarily conflating the two. If “Me not happy” had been the extent of the story’s treatment of Tonto then sure, it is doing an injustice. But if “Me not happy” is a springboard for a deeper examination, then it’s doing much more than name call. And this is kinda obvious, isn’t it? If the principle of free speech is not enough to deter us from misconstruing literature, can’t good reading at least do so?

I used to begin my literature courses with a very important announcement:

“Students, I don’t care about your opinions.”

Seriously. This isn’t Oprah’s book club and literary study has nothing to do with what my colleagues in STEM say about us—that in the Humanities every interpretation is valid. Bullshit. Most opinions are unbearably invalid. But the reactions that provoked those opinions? —they’re not something to shrug off. In fact, that is precisely where we should be starting.

A reaction is different from an opinion, and it matters whether you think you’re hawking the one or the other. If it’s an opinion then it means you’ve sifted your reactions through a series of ethical and aesthetic filters and settled on a judgment. Whereas a reaction is a starting point, an opinion is a conclusion. And it’s much harder to reconsider conclusions than starting points.

I think part of the reason why we lose track of this is the fault of big bad words. Curse words, much like language infused with racist stereotypes, are blunt instruments. You can apply curse words to so many circumstances. That’s what makes them so useful. And though they are widely applicable, they somehow feel concrete. That probably seems contradictory, because the wider a set of examples you can apply something to, the more generic it must be, right? Not always. And curse words prove that (as does a whole lot of math).

Curse words feel precise, because the emotions they evoke are crisp. When I called that guy an asshole last week—yeah, you know who you are; you not only cut me off but then gave me the finger when I honked—anyway, where was I? Yes. Precision. When I called that guy an asshole, it really felt like I was pinning him down. Nothing about the emotional resonances that term inspires feels wishy washy or ambiguous. That’s why bad words so often rush to our assistance in times of annoyance. Racist language performs similar feats—it characterizes rather than describes.

For example, if you compare my student’s expletive to something like, say, rude or mean, there’s no contest. Mean feels generic. Really though, it’s no more or less precise a term than asshole, at least semantically. For what qualifies as asshole behavior? What is the essence of assholeness? Nothing more exacting than the essence of meanness. But whereas the former lands with a thud, the other one barely leaves a mark.

The emotional resonances evoked by certain forms of language can dupe us into thinking we’re being more exacting in our communiqués than we really are. And that semblance of accuracy can make it seem like our work has been done—no need to say more, no elaboration needed. The guy’s an asshole. Nuff said.

Whether they be an Agamemnon or a Tonto, it’s a lot easier to give in to your initial reaction and then, simply, give up on doing more. We do this kind of thing in real life too. You tell someone to piss off or pity them as victims and then move on. It might not be the end of the world when it’s a guy on the freeway. You’re most likely not going to see them again. Fictional characters fall in this category too. After all, they’re not going to leap off the screen and follow you home.

Then again, all kinds of people we did not expect to play an important role in our lives oftentimes do.

You never know who’s going to be relevant to your storyline and, perhaps even more importantly, whose precedent will determine how you act going forward. I know teachers who treat their families like their students, and mothers who treat their husbands like their children (not always without good reason, but still). In other words, how you get used to acting with one group of people often carries over to another group.

Which is why I try to treat characters like a spouse. That’s right. Someone I’m stuck with, even if I’m the one who chose to crack the cover.

I never used to think of relationships with literature this way. But then I came across this moment in Scott McClanahan’s beautiful novel The Sarah Book:

“all the students wanted to do was talk about whether the characters in the stories were good people or bad people or whether the writer was a good person or a bad person. Like this even existed.”

This is the protagonist speaking. He is a writer and a teacher, and he’s fed up with his classes litigating the readings. He’s also a husband and father suffering through a messy, heartbreaking divorce. And what better example of the ethical ambiguity of human behavior, the kind of thing great literature forces us to confront, than a divorce? During which the beauty and goodness you fell in love with in someone, becomes the very source of your pain. Most characters are neither good or bad for the simple reason that most people are not simply good or bad, always.

Which is why I told my student: Asshole is a fine place to begin, but it cannot be the only place you end up. Agamemnon may be horrible, but he is also so much more. As are most great characters in works of fiction. As are most real people in real life, all the amazing, minor, and mediocre people alike.

True, part of the fun of fiction is hating on bad guys. And a character is just make believe, and in that way more like someone who swerves in and out of our lives than a spouse. It’s not like they’re gonna sue us for damages if we call them a bad name. But do we really want to get used to thinking that way?

Maybe the point isn’t that an Agamemnon is just a character. Maybe the real point is that he’s another character among many—fictional and non—who end up peopling a life. And since you will never know which characters will stick around, why not hedge your bets? Because that’s the thing. You really don’t know who that person’s going to be who’s life will prove consequential to your own, nor which version of that person you’ll end up with at any given moment. Anyone who’s ever been in and out of love has surely learnt that lesson.

No one wants to be that asshole (isn’t that why so much marriage counseling is about teaching couples not to name-call?). It’s not that a bad word is necessarily inaccurate. It’s that it’s almost always insufficient. I’d much rather be worse than someone’s expectations, than less.