Guest blogger NUTS4R2 looks at the essential role of the companion in literature.

With the recent thunderstorms piercing sleep’s dark veil in the night, otherwise known as my double glazing, I found myself returning to the questions posed by the recent article I wrote for Wordsworth Editions (Will the real protagonist please stand up) about the categorisation of literary heroes and wondering, perhaps, if I could work out what the most common variants of their companions have been over the years. Perhaps not as easy a task as focusing on the main culprits and their noble adventures but since slumber has not been returning so easily through the ‘nights of thunder’, as I shall tentatively remember this period, I thought I’d press on and at least attempt to relieve some of the burdens for these heroic archetypes by formulating the sub-types of their fictional significant others. So after a good long think, supplemented by notably frequent cups of tea as the rain hit my windows, I have come to the conclusion that there are, indeed, certain archetypes of companionable assistants throughout literature and, furthermore, although they can be grouped into, for my purposes here, six categories, they nearly all share at least one similarity. As it is though, I only want to explore five of them in this particular essay since, as far as I’m concerned, one of my identified types crosses over more into another category of character altogether… and so I shall hold back on that one for now and merely identify it. These are my six categories and, as I said, I shall be looking at five in this list a little closer. We have 1) The Loyal Assistant, 2) The Disloyal Assistant, 3) The Lover, 4) The Unexpected Helper, 5) The Invisible Ally and, a sixth mystery one which I shall save until the end here before naming. Let’s look at the most common of these companions first, then…

1. The Loyal Assistant

Pretty much the most common and also self-explanatory of the companions that you can find in literature. They are there to assist, fetch the tea, help do the tedious legwork and otherwise make themselves useful. After all, where would Conan Doyle’s Holmes be without his Watson or E. F. Benson’s Lucia be without her Georgie? These are people who have usually (at least after a number of stories) known the central protagonist of a tale for quite some time and are entirely proficient with the methodology conducted by them in the course of their adventures. Sometimes they will even be called upon to save the main character from an untimely demise or, at least, in Benson’s Lucia novels, a fate worse than death itself… the embarrassment of being ‘found out’ by your social circle. Isn’t it, after all, Georgie who saves the day at one point when he procures a copy of a genuine Italian letter for Lucia to replicate in her own handwriting so she doesn’t have to give away that she, after all these years, has only pretended she can speak the language? Of course, characters like Doctor Watson are at least as equally handy, ready to save Holme’s life, or at least livelihood, with his trusty revolver as much as, say, one or more of D’Artagnan’s companions in the Musketeer books by Dumas would be as helpful for their friend with the cutting edge of their collectively keen blades. However, they all share two traits; one is common to pretty much all of my identified ‘companion types’ and a second is shared by many, though not all. The first is the necessity of the much feared and dreaded, by many writers and also actors, need for exposition. These characters are a conduit for the reader to allow the hero to explain all or part of his or her cunning plan to their friend so that the reader can know just what is going on. And you get this in all kinds of fiction and this is why these secondary characters partly exist… so the writer can explain to the audience everything they need to know about a situation… or there wouldn’t be a story to be told. If this means said companions are a little slower on the uptake than the heroes of whatever colourful tale is being told then so be it. Some Hollywood directors, for example, have made these characters even more stupid, when called for, to make the introduction of expository dialogue into the text easier. So, for instance, my absolute favourite rendition of Doctor Watson on screen would be that of Nigel Bruce opposite Basil Rathbone’s wonderful version of Sherlock Holmes. Bruce played him incredibly densely and the comedy and ease of allowing Holmes to explain the situation to Watson for those slower in the audience made it all that much easier. He’s not exactly the most accurate portrayal of the character as he’s rendered in Arthur Conan Doyle’s literature, that’s for sure and, a far cry from Martin Freeman’s portrayal of the character in the TV series Sherlock (which is probably my second favourite take on the character) but, for my money, Bruce is hard to beat and he is a better companion to keep the pacing going, as far as I’m concerned. Of course, the other common quality that these ‘good companions’ need… and this applies to almost but not quite all of them… is the ability to get themselves in trouble if the story needs some extra padding out. If your writer finds himself (or indeed, herself) covering ground far too hastily, then these companions can be kidnapped or trapped or in some other fashion put in harm’s way so that the hero can dynamically rescue them in lively denouements limited only by the scribe’s imagination. Such is always the way and, as old as this unenvious quality is in literature it’s still, just like the necessity of exposition, alive and kicking in pretty much all writing today.

2. The Disloyal Assistant

This one is a trickier fish and, strictly speaking, is usually only a companion for a certain part of a book or film. The disloyal assistant is the one I’m really not wanting to comment on here as I think the overlap with the all-important ‘villain’ of a piece moves them much more firmly into the antagonist camp than anywhere else and that is a subject for another time. I mention them here merely because they exist and, despite their betrayal and misdeeds at a certain dramatic point in a narrative, could be perhaps counted among the main protagonist’s companions for a short time, at least. Let’s say no more about this nefarious creature… we shall leave this disloyalty for another time.

3. The Lover.

Again, certainly an explanatory handle in that she, or sometimes he, is the lover of the hero (or sometimes of another companion) and as such fulfil a companion’s role in certain ways although, it has to be said if the loyal companion is primarily associated with exposition with a side dose of peril, the Lois Lanes of this world seem much more prone to getting in trouble so their own personal supermen can rescue them and with the explanations of the mechanics of the story taking a back seat for them (although that element is still present to a degree). So, for example, if the formula for a Loyal Assistant took the form of LA = E/P where E is Exposition and P is Peril, then the formula for The Lover would be LOVE = P/E. Almost the inverse of this but they are still, in their peril, very useful. There are, of course, other ways in which the lovers can be used as a way of moving the action along by an author. For example, when they are the lover of another companion, an unseen character such as Gladys Hungerton in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World becomes the sole reason why Professor Challenger’s new right arm Edward Malone goes on his dangerous adventure with the Professor… to impress Gladys and win her heart and hand in marriage. The fact that Gladys marries a humble, legal clerk in Malone’s absence as a punchline to the novel, while he is off trying hard not to get eaten by dinosaurs, is neither here nor there. She has served her purpose in the text and motivated one of the central characters in the adventure. And, of course, The Lover can very easily be used as leverage against the hero by a villainous machination during the course of a thrilling adventure. Look at the way Marjorie Lindon is used in Richard Marsh’s excellent tale The Beetle (which is a contemporary publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and which, I believe, outsold it in the earliest days of their joint publication history). She is a bargaining chip, in so many words, to reward complicity by another character to further the nefarious ends of the rapscallion in question. So lovers can be much more, in terms of the story, than a mere romantic outlet for the heroes and heroines of these wonderful tales. A whole world of perilous dalliances is open to them.

4. The Unexpected Helper.

I’ll keep this one short. This companion type is, in some ways, almost identical to The Loyal Assistant but with an added advantage for the writer who wants to get his story told as easily as possible. These characters find themselves on an adventure with the main protagonist for the first time, just like Edward Malone who I mentioned earlier. They are a stranger to the hero of the tale and, just like all the other companions, are subject to both expository dialogue and sudden peril. However, because of their inexperience in the kinds of plots in which they will have to survive, the hero can much more easily explain great swathes of story points to them under the guise of their ignorance. So their formula might look like UH = 2E/P. Therefore, the unexpected helper doesn’t have to be as stupid as his loyal attendants… just staggeringly out of their depth. Sometimes a good twenty thousand leagues out of their depth when it comes to their mastery of certain scientific knowledge compared to the main protagonist or hero of the situation. This brings me to my favourite but far less common type of companion…

5. The Invisible Ally

The Invisible Ally is a term I’ve come up with for a companion which does just what it says on the tin (and in the case of one such character, that tin has the name Nautilus). This is a character who will help out the hero but the hero will have no idea who is giving him the aid he requires. Sometimes the character will be hiding in plain sight or, sometimes, the character is a completely unknown element and, either way, will not be revealed until a twist or revelation much later in the story causes him to come forward and show himself (or he is finally discovered). Such is the case of my favourite example of The Invisible Ally, Captain Nemo himself. Once the villain of the piece in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, he turns up as more of a heroic type in my favourite of Verne’s novels, Mysterious Island. All the way through, the castaways on the island are being helped by a mysterious and unseen presence who acts as a deus ex machina kind of character to them… rescuing their dog Top from certain death, for example, or leaving a box of provisions and a weapon in a box for them. Over time, the companions discover the identity of their mysterious benefactor none other than the famous Captain Nemo, who helps them escape from the island and who reveals to them the true identity of his more famous avatar. Sometimes, of course, the invisible ally is someone well known to the hero of a tale but said protagonist is blindly unaware that the help is being given from a certain person. As I say, these kinds of characters are rarer than the other archetypes but a more modern equivalent would be Professor Albus Dumbledore in J. K. Rowling’s phenomenally successful Harry Potter stories. In the first of these tales, Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, Harry is anonymously given a cloak of invisibility which is of great help to him in his exploits later in the story. It’s not until the end of the tale, of course, that he finds that the person who equipped him for his adventure was, in fact, the head of the school, Professor Dumbledore. So there you go, The Invisible Ally as a companion to the hero does, I’m glad to say, live on to this day. Which I’m glad about because they always bring a little mystery to the heart of the story as far as I’m concerned… not to mention a huge dollop of explanatory text towards the end of an adventure. So the formula for The Invisible Ally would be IA = Eq/2E… where Eq equals the equipment necessary to do the job at hand. This leads me to the last of the kind of companions that I have been able to unearth from the corners of literature and that is, of course…

6. The Loyal Reader

Yes, that’s right… you. The Loyal Reader. You are the ultimate companion in a hero’s tale and whether you are reading the journal of Doctor Watson’s exploits about his friend Holmes, are sitting in the pub with the friends of William Hope Hodgson’s ghost finder Carnacki, waiting to hear of his latest exploits or are playing Bridge with E. F. Benson’s Mistress Mapp in Tilling, desperately trying to catch out Lucia and play the game of oneupmanship the best you can… The Loyal Reader, while rarely in peril, is the ultimate vessel to contain the huge amounts of great exposition that the struggling writer can cram into their tales. So with that… and before I start to set my mind to identify the various types of villains to be found in literature… I thank you reader for bearing with me and hope that you have, at the very least, found my verbal ponderings on the subject of those all-important companions sufficiently entertaining. Go safe in the knowledge that you… and every other reader forevermore… can be safely summed up with the formula… LR = E x FM… where FM is, in exposition terms, the Full Monty.

To read my regular blog – nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk

The post Great Expositions appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

There are certain questions which plague my mind in the small hours of the night. The otherworldly realm between sleep and the alarm clock when one desperately needs to return to darkness but the forward motion of the brain makes it impossible… giving one’s face a corpse’s pallor and stubbornly rendering one’s waking hours of gainful employment something akin to the slow shuffle of a zombie through a graveyard. The sleepless voids in which man’s darkest questions are unleashed often bring up enquiries which I find myself unable to answer and so, this possibly semi-regular post may be the place where I stir certain questions around in my brain and see if I can come up with an outcome which, at the very least, makes some sense to me.

This week my waking thoughts were of the difference between archetypes of main protagonists or, for want of a less buzzworthy term… heroes. Are the literary types of men and women who populate the fictional adventures of such titans as Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, William Hope Hodgson, George Lucas, Kenneth Robeson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dennis Wheatley or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to name a few, all made of the same stuff… asides from the ‘right stuff’? Are there similarities between them which might be called upon as examples of the ‘ingredients’ of a character of good standing? Are there rules and, indeed, if there are rules… would they be of deliberate conformity or are they just manifestations of only a few routes the human mind can conceive to bring a certain kind of character together in as credible a manner as possible if a writer or director, say, were wanting to bring home the bacon and survive off them?

Now, I’m not going to go all Joseph Campbell on you here, I reckon. I’ve never read The Hero With A Thousand Faces (don’t worry… it’s on my hit list of future reads) but I’m not concerned here with the hero’s journey as much as I am with identifying the different versions that these literary or cinematic (or a thrilling combination of the two) protectors of a certain kind of justice have manifested themselves in over the years. I reckon I can boil it down to two main types of heroes and both of each type can be seen to have different reactions and outcomes to the kinds of adventures they might find themselves in. The first of my two types would rarely, unless being written about in the form of a parody or post-modern extension of a specific character, cross paths with the ‘enhanced world’ of the second type of hero in anything other than possibly making an appearance in the realm inhabited by that second type.

Okay… so, I’m going to use examples of those authors and creators I’ve used above to demonstrate how I can split the classic hero into two distinct sub-types.

The first type, that which I often refer to as the Scooby Doo hero, is the rigid man of science. He is an expert, highly competent in his specific field or is someone less knowledgeable but firmly entrenched in the scientific world. Everything within his adventure will make absolutely perfect sense, even if it doesn’t at first appear to be the case, with the caveat that such explanations given to render any pursuit of the supernatural would be limited to the speculative science of the era in which he is being written… as opposed to the era in which he is set. If a specific story is set in the past, for example… in which case, hindsight might come into play if a character is set in, say, the 1930s but is being written about with the scientific knowledge of a writer from contemporary times.

These kinds of heroes can be found in persons such as both of Arthur Conan Doyle’s two characters Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger, who are men of rigid science, even though Challenger’s adventures tend to cross paths with the worlds of fantasy to some extent. Such heroes can also be found quite a lot within the literature of Jules Verne, who has a whole host of these rigid men of science who are able to explain away the kinds of fantastical phenomena they tend to stumble on or create involvement with. Even Barbicane, the hero of Verne’s speculative science fiction story From The Earth To The Moon, is able to rigidly explain everything he witnesses on his journey to something within the realm of pure scientific reasoning. Ditto for the aforementioned Professor Challenger, who is able to explain away dinosaurs and other strange phenomena well within the boundaries of science, even if such a thing is beyond the realms of possibility… certainly looking from today’s end of the telescope. Heck… even the strange creatures that inhabit Barsoom (Mars) in Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian tales, often but not always headed up by the hero John Carter, are pursued by their protagonists with the, admittedly highly speculative, scientific backdrop required to enable such fantasies to exist as something that… COULD happen (couldn’t they?). Certainly, in 1912 when the first tale, Under The Moons Of Mars (later changed to the more familiar A Princess Of Mars) was written, there would surely have been more leverage in the words of the writer than would be given pause for plausibility these days. And the seeming superpowers of the early books’ heroic John Carter are phenomena which exist because his Earth muscles are used to a much larger pull of gravity on his own planet and he is less hampered on Mars (which was the same explanation with Siegle and Shuster’s iconic superhero Superman on his debut in 1938).

A  good example where the seemingly supernatural mystery is revealed to be anything but by a science hero is also the story which is largely recognised as being the first modern detective tale. Written in 1841, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders In The Rue Morgue’ was the first of three stories to highlight the exploits of C. Auguste Dupin (the other two being ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’). In his first tale, Dupin’s reasoning mind makes short work of a plot involving a locked room mystery and rules out any supernatural invention in the solving of ghastly murder at its heart. I won’t reveal the solution here but Poe’s creation, perhaps underused by the great writer himself, was extremely influential and was a direct influence on a lot of literary detectives in his wake… including a special mention in the first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the 1866 story A Study In Scarlet.

Perhaps the best example, purely from taking part in well over 200 adventures, most of them written by Lester Dent under the Street & Smith publishing company’s pen name Kenneth Robeson, is the character who was often marketed quite clearly as a ‘science detective’… Doc Savage. He, like all the other heroes of scientific reasoning, is a full-on practitioner of the Scooby Doo Man Of Mystery in that, more so than the others, the plots of the pulps he and his colleagues were inhabiting were deliberately fantastical and often under the guise of some manifestation of supernatural or alien phenomena. But fear not, just as the kids in the old Scooby Doo Where Are You? cartoon (and the majority of the later incarnations of the show) would pull the mask from the seemingly supernatural monster to reveal a bland and embittered human who had managed to wreak havoc with the surprisingly casual appliance of some costly science… so too would Doc Savage, The Man Of Bronze, lift the lid on assorted werewolves, eye-popping death, goblins, sea monsters and various other manifestations of what you might call the ‘supernatural’ world and demonstrate that everything was down to the invention of a living, breathing, human villain as opposed to what the rest of the protagonists in the story would take at their ghostly face value.

So there you go… men of science.

But there’s also the OTHER kind of hero too…

The men who have either a good working knowledge of, or at least an open mind to, what I shall call… for the sake of argument… the supernatural world. These people are often equipped with the knowledge that will allow them to beat their otherworldly foes and will, quite often, pursue them with the exact same passion as the ‘scientific hero’ I’ve just been talking about.

So we have characters like Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing… pursuing Dracula and saving lives with all the knowledge of the creatures known as vampires at his disposal. We have William Hope Hodgson’s Carnaki, the enemy of the haunted world of invading spirits, battling the forces of darkness with the tools of his trade and resorting to the same kinds of symbols and rituals, dressed up as almost scientific fact, in much the same way that his spiritual inheritor, Dennis Wheatley’s Duc de Richleau, does in his very own supernatural adventure, The Devil Rides Out.

Like George Lucas’ character Luke Skywalker, who is inhabiting a world of hard science which has a supernatural element in the very practical spiritual dimension known as The Force, these characters pursue their worlds as doggedly as a scientist, even though they are using skills or special powers that actually have no credence, really, in the world of scientific phenomena, by any stretch of the imagination.

And so, my conclusion is that these two types are pretty much the same two kinds of heroes you get throughout art and literature to this day… and it’s hard to imagine anything different. In some ways, the second of the two kinds, who I shall now dub ‘The Supernatural Warrior’, are much more suited to negotiate pretty much any form of literary domain than ‘The Scientific Heroes’ are credibly able to do. If a science hero found him or herself suddenly thrust into a world inhabited by spiritual antagonists, for example, and they could find no explanation within the realm of their own scientific knowledge and reasoning. They are left defenceless against such lurking menaces, just like the non-heroic protagonist of an H. P. Lovecraft story, where the main character is as likely to slip into the dark embrace of madness as cut to the heart of the mystery before him.

As if to, almost, prove a point… in the very last of the original run of Doc Savage novels, which were first published as pulp magazines in a ‘one novel a month’ format, we have the final tale, Up From Earth’s Centre. In this tale, we have the only time that Doc Savage meets a phenomenon which he can’t explain away with science. The story tells of Doc Savage’s descent into, what appears to be and is never proven as anything else, the very depths of Hell. He, of course, escapes with his life intact but has absolutely no explanation for the weird and inexplicable events of this adventure. For once, Doc is at a loss and, as if the science hero once disproven was deemed spent by the powers that be, the magazine was promptly cancelled. My own, personal theory is that Lester Dent, on finding that the publication that had been providing him with a living (and which he had been writing, with a few months off, at the rate of one novel a month from 1933 to 1949) was about to be cancelled, deliberately wrote an open-ended story that would not be solved until a subsequent ‘return trip to hell’ was forthcoming in a later issue. Perhaps he thought he could get enough readers writing in and demanding a scientific solution to the mystery to keep the, once very popular character, afloat for another year or two? Who knows? It makes an interesting ending, though, for a character who was always the ultimate science hero to be finally confounded by the kind of mystery that was his bread and butter for so long and that, in the end, the world of the supernatural proved to be too much for him.

If he had been guest-starring in another character’s story, however, things may have seemed a little more hopeful…

The writing in such tales can be such that the scientific hero can make a good ‘straight man turned stooge’ for The Supernatural Warrior, in that they can enrich the story with a contrary notion which can be contradicted to explain to the reader or viewer the true, to the fantasy realm, state of affairs of the fantastic monster which is probably lurking at the heart of the story to jump out at you. It can work the other way around too but, when the tables are turned, the revelation is often less satisfying and The Supernatural Warrior can also be as helpful and ready to ‘pitch in’ with his ‘real world skills’ as any other character. So the punchline, as it were, is rather spoiled, I feel, in situations such as this. In other words, when The Science Hero is also a fish out of water, things can get quite distraught and dramatic for them.

That being said, I have a soft spot for both of these types of main protagonists, even if they suddenly find themselves thrust into the role of ‘Helpful Companion’ by the confines of the plot in these kinds of tales. I can enjoy all my heroes responsibly and with a sound mind that the various worlds they inhabit can constitute a pleasant post-modern melange in the mind of the reader. Always a good thing, I reckon.

However, now that my main type of heroic figures is thusly categorised, I now have the equally large problem of inquiring into the nature of such companions, sweethearts and villains that the average heroic traveller of either category may find themselves encumbered within the course of their adventures. I also have to ask myself why so many of the adventurers carrying forward these internal struggles seem to be so alone when it comes to the opportunity of romantic companionship, which seems to be a pretty common factor, it has to be said. Perhaps, though, these are questions best left unanswered until another sleepless night comes upon me.

To read my regular blog on movies, TV, music and books, go to nuts4r2.blogspot.com

The post Will the real protagonist please stand up? appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.