Glancing back, peeking forward | Antileaders

Firstly, I would like to thank Anna and May (and Fiona in advance) for their hard work in reviewing for the FMLM Bookclub. Picking up momentum from the foundation of the FMLM itself, they have helped the Bookclub to develop into what I hope will be a valuable resource for members over the years to come. Our ultimate goal is still to create a library of précis and synopses of clinical leadership titles by reviewing one book every month in an interactive forum. We also want to keep you abreast of the latest releases and are always keen to hear what you would like to see reviewed, or how the Bookclub might develop. If you have any ideas on these or would like to be a Bookclub reviewer, then contact us at bookclub [at] fmlm.ac.uk. We are about to organise reviewers for the rest of the year, so if you haven’t already done so, contact us to get involved. 

Every so often, I will also be posting this Editor’s Blog to keep you up to date with FMLM Bookclub news, but also to tweak the book in Bookclub that little bit more...

Antihero, antileader

Rather than being drawn by the clean-shaven literary swashbuckler, I have always been far more compelled by the trials and machinations of the broad-definition antihero; the protagonist that, although not written with an opaque heroic quality, nonetheless elicits sympathy against a plethoric background of more despicable qualities. For example: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt; Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly; Heller’s John Yossarian; and Dostoyevsky’s Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. These characters could have hardly been crafted as more dissimilar to a totemic embodiment of leadership, but perhaps through their cast, their mould, their negative, we can be spurred on to think something more of leadership in juxtaposition to “antileadership”.

What can we read into Gynt’s attempt at self-absolution in the form of an escapist anti-odyssey from home to pushing the slave trade in China, to wasting away in an Egyptian insane asylum? Can Reilly’s delusional and charmingly loathsome sloth tell us something about how we might consider our own thoughts and the effects of our actions in contrast to how others perceive and are affected by us? Was it cowardice or sanity that drove Yossarian to the hilariously evasive lengths of subverting the aerial war effort whilst simultaneously sliding up the ranks? And just how could Raskolnikov delude himself into justifying murder through the belief that he is subject to an extraordinary moral code.

Well, after dodging the eternally bland purgatory proffered by the Button Molder, Gynt finally returns home and comes to understand the earlier forecast of the Troll King: “Man, to thyself be true”. At the last minute, Reilly flees with his anti-ideological femme, Myrna, from a spiralling depravity that has lead him through dabbling in pants, hotdogs, and porn, culminating in a narrow escape from being committed to Charity Hospital. After failing to get sent home on an ill-ticket*, Yossarian finally accepts his own moral responsibility and goes AWOL again, this time yomping north in pursuit of neutral Sweden. And even Raskolnikov, perhaps the most psychologically disturbed and disturbing of my antiheros, is able to find moral redemption and regeneration with the support of love and piety, but not before the frozen rod of justice in the form of Siberian exile is used to break his back.

All these characters face internal and external conflict, and each in their own way survive to become what we would like to believe may be a healed and more whole person. Their combined flaws (selfishness, criminality, cowardice, insanity, perversity, the list goes on...) are those that would appear to cast the perfect “antileader”. But is it simple enough to polarise a spectrum of leadership traits? We already think not, but these authors have still managed to capture me with an enduring fascination of what not to do and still survive.

Who are your favourite fictional antiheros and how have they embodied the concept of “antileadership”?

-Tom Turmezei
FMLM Bookclub Editor

*From a medic’s perspective there is also a deliciously ironic blurt of plot-characteristic irrationality in Catch-22 from the squadron medic, Doc Daneeka, who responds to Yossarian’s plea to save his life by sending him home with: “It’s not my business to save lives”!