Why does every story meet an antagonist?

A note from the editorial team

In the first instalment of Behind the Words we crossed, with Loredana Filippi, the word threshold: the point where what obstructs us places itself before us and asks to be seen.

Then, in Olga Corti's account, that threshold took on a concrete form: two eyelids that kept reopening, and a sentence able to shift the problem all at once.

Now another figure appears: the antagonist. That which opposes us, interrupts a balance and makes it impossible to carry on exactly as before. In this new stage of Behind the Words, with Loredana Filippi we enter the forest of fairy tales, where the safe road is lost and the story begins to move.

Now let us return to Loredana's text, and to a figure that runs through fairy tales: the antagonist.

I think of the hero in Vladimir Propp, the Russian folklorist who studied the morphology of the folktale: he does not become a hero by staying comfortably at home. He becomes a hero when he meets the antagonist, when he loses the road or the precious object, when the forest grows dense.

Many of the fairy tales and myths of our history tell it this way, from Snow White to Dante's dark wood: conflict is a first door. Skip it, and the story never starts.

Vladimir Propp studied fairy tales and left us a map. Many stages, but if you look at the whole, something recurs: the hero sets out from home, everything seems normal. Then something happens: a balance breaks, a prohibition is violated, or something is taken away. The antagonist appears as the ground gives way underfoot. It is the problem-knot that imposes itself.

Without it, the hero stays sitting by the hearth and the tale ends on page two.

How many times have we wished to avoid meeting the antagonist? Not to lose the safe road, not to enter the forest.

It is human.

The forest is frightening.

Conflict hurts.

And yet it is there that the magical helper can appear. It is there that you can find the object that will help you, the lamp that carries the genie in its belly and that you have to «rub» to set it going.

But this happens only afterwards, never before.

This is where, for me, conflict becomes a threshold once again. It is not a wall to stop you. It is a door that marks a boundary, a before and an after. A door that is “closed”, but only to let you through.

And then there is the lamp.

The genie of the lamp does not come out if the lamp stays still, intact, on a shelf. It comes out only if you rub it. The friction makes heat, and the heat makes light.

The conflict we try to avoid is the lamp we do not touch for fear of breaking it. We keep it clean, but unlit. How many times do we say «I can't face this right now»? That is the moment when the conflict-call knocks and you pretend not to be home.

You protect the lamp, but you hold back the genie.

What happens when you stop fighting against yourself? What happens is that the energy you were using to hold the door shut comes back to you. It is not that the conflict disappears. It is that you stop using it «against», rather than in your favour. And then it can become a passage.

Sometimes friction is this too: the rub between who you were and who you are becoming.

The question, then, is not only: what do I do to overcome the conflict?

But also: what is the problem placing before me?

What is it, of everything I knew, that is no longer enough?

And what if the antagonist were not only the one who bars our way, but what shows us that the road we took before is no longer enough?

Behind the Words

Text drawn from the unpublished essay «Il conflitto come soglia» by Loredana Filippi.

The path continues

From the structure of fairy tales to the works that let us cross through conflict without claiming to explain it.

Five works for crossing through conflict

Coming soon on L'Agorà.