Paidika

In honour of father’s day, I think we can all celebrate our fathers all the more heartily  by comparison to these foul characters—not that I would need the comparison heartily to celebrate my Dad.

1.     Agamemnon, the Oresteia. No question about this accolade for that kudistos anax andrôn (“most honoured lord of men”): by all means go and fight a war “allotrias diai gynaikos” (“for the sake of some strange woman”), but don’t slam a knife in your daughter’s ribs in the process. And that bit about leading her to the altar by tricking her into thinking she’s about to wed Achilles—pretty shitty. As far as I’m concerned Orestes and Elektra were suffering from stockholm syndrome; otherwise, no one would have batted an eye at the bathtub axing of this awful dad.
Of course, if we were giving out prizes for literature’s worst uncle, Agamemnon’s father Atreus would take the cake—nephews are not for eating. Worst cousin? Aegisthus. Then again, Pelops, patriarch of this tribe, might deserve the title of literature’s worst sire for having fathered such a rotten bunch.

2.    Lear, King Lear. “If she must teem / Create her child of spleen, that it may live / And be a thwart disnatured torment to her. / Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, / With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks, / Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits  / To laughter and contempt, that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.” If you’re saying this to your daughter, you’re doing it wrong.

3.    Abraham, the Bible. I suppose the place of the “father of a multitude” on this list depends on how you make out the sacrifice of Isaac. I think that Kant’s response is appropriate: “Even if the voices were to resound from a visible heaven, Abraham should have answered the alleged, divine voices by saying, ‘That I should not kill my good son is clear to me; but that you, who appear to me, be God, that is not at all clear and can also never become clear.’”

4.    Cholly Breedlove, The Bluest Eye. Morrison’s characters are never caricatures, so perhaps Cholly’s presence on this list does her a disservice in the complexity that she sketches out, even for him. Still, he rapes and impregnates his daughter, Pecola.

5.     Okonkwo, Things Fall Apart – let’s face it: between volunteering to kill Ikemefuna, the child who had come to regard him as a father, and shooting at one of his wives during a festival when violence is strictly forbidden, the protagonist of Achebe’s masterpiece is not exactly a family man. But no more was his father, who let debts accumulate while he sang. Maybe it runs in the family.

6.     Creon, Antigone. I’m not sure one’s seen harsh until, thanks to someone’s refusal to relent on an order of punishment, his wife, son, and daughter-in-law kill themselves in an afternoon.

7.    Simon Dedalus, Ulysses – for all those peaceable, slovenly, drunken dads whom it’s hard to hate but who nonetheless let their families go to waste. Another contender for this slot is Alfred Doolittle of Pygmalion, who’s effectively the same character except dreamed up by Shaw and English.

8.    Kambyses, the Histories. The second king of the Persian archê makes the cut just barely, since his wife is pregnant when he murders her. The madness of Kambyses is a rich and complex part of the Histories and I don’t want to reduce it to some Orientalizing discourse—but still K. is an unsavoury character. Dreaming that his brother Smerdis is sitting on a throne with his head touching the sky, he arranges for Smerdis’ murder; when his wife upbraids him for it and insults his masculinity in one go, he lashes out at her, causing her to miscarry her child; thereafter he shoots an arrow through the heart of a trusted advisor’s son, buries twelve Persians upside-down in the sand, orders Croesus killed—then relents but has the servants who hid Croesus executed for disobeying his orders in the first place—and starts defacing temples and laughing at other people’s gods. What a cad.

9.   Cyrus Trask, East of Eden. Picture-perfect bastard.

10.  Macon Dead, Song of Solomon. Another Morrison character on here—she’s apparently very good at writing up bad dads. Macon doesn’t even compare to Cholly Breedlove, but let me just say I wouldn’t have wanted to be his child.