The Freedom of the Outlaw

I went to a talk on Monday about outlaws. One of the good things about working at a university is that you have free access to cutting edge research which you can dip in and out of at will. This talk considered the evolution of "outlaw tales" such as those of Gamelyn, Hereward the Wake, Fulk Fitzwarin, in the medieval period and how they developed into, basically, Kevin Costner's Robin Hood.

It being a British university the spin which both lecturer and audience put on the popularity of outlaw tales was vaguely Marxian in nature: the outlaw tales that have survived tend to be ones about outlaws from the nobility and yeomanry, who represent the resentment of the wealthy towards taxation by the monarchy. The typical pattern is for a person to become an outlaw because of justified reasons, eventually to be forgiven and return to the establishment. This shows the fundamentally conservative character of the middle classes, who desire a level of freedom from interference but whose ambition is to advance their social standing within the existing system. Meanwhile, we never get the outlaw tales of the genuinely poor which were never recorded and which (in the eyes of your typical lefty English humanities professor) would naturally have been more revolutionary in scope.

It sounds like a lot of balderdash to me, but then again so does most of what my colleagues tend to argue about things. I think the outlaw tale appeals because of something much more basic about human nature: we all, at some time or other, feel the desire to go against social convention and family pressures - really, to be genuinely free. Most of us repress this desire, but we like to fantasise about it. Living vicariously through an outlaw gives vent to it: it's fun to imagine being Robin Hood, disobeying the law, living with your friends in the forest, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. It's just as fun, if not more so, to imagine giving way to less apparently just urges than redistribution: one of the greatest of all outlaw tales is Egil's Saga, which is really just a catalogue of violent crime and mischief in which scores of people are murdered and mutilated with gleeful abandon. I'd suggest that Punch and Judy shows are in that same tradition of giving the audience license to enjoy the idea of freedom from social and familial ties: who hasn't had moments in their life where they sort of wish they could just bludgeon everybody around them with a club? (I don't mean that seriously - well, not entirely seriously anyway.)

We voluntarily restrain our freedom much of the time (although funnily enough I was listening to Frank Furedi lecture on the legacy of Sartre and the inevitability of freedom on my commute home this evening, so I stake out that position advisedly, as well as remind myself that being a Marxist doesn't mean you have to see human behaviour as being simply a clockwork and predetermined working-out of socio-economic forces). But that doesn't mean we always do it happily. Underneath our sensible, responsible need to fit in, we undoubtedly also have a freedom-loving, authority-hating id, and we have a strange admiration for those who release theirs.

I think that there is an element of D&D and other role-playing games which taps into that. While not wishing to speak for everybody, I don't think it's an accident that the default mode of playing RPGs tends towards criminality, towards outlawry in the sense of being outside of the law, outside of social and familial convention, outside of the ties of tradition and morality which, naturally and justly, bind us in our everyday lives. Playing D&D is another branch in the evolution of the outlaw tale: it's a mechanism through which we explore and enjoy what it is to be free. And to bring it back to Sartre, perhaps what makes it different from the outlaw tale is that, like in a Sartre novel, there are no excuses for D&D PCs. They can't blame their cowardice, their foolhardiness, their avarice, or their violence on the way they were brought up, their socio-economic background, their brain chemistry, or their genes. They can only blame it on their own (our) choices: they, which is to say us, are free. There may be something profoundly important about that.