Thursday 18 June 2015

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.

24 comments:

  1. I got the impression the Egil's Saga was a combination "horrible warning about prioritizing revenge" and Icelandic "Game of Thrones" in the "what horrible thing will happen next/Oh no he didn't" school of storytelling.

    I haven't really notice the outlaw thing in my own RPG experience, though. I've found that my players (and myself when I'm playing) are more interested in being part of larger organizations and building/doing things that effect the gameworld, usually positively.

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    1. It isn't really a horrible warning, though, because Egil ends up living to a ripe and happy old age! Obviously we all experience fiction in different ways but I quite identified with Egil in a strange way. I think I read somewhere that he's one of the only, if not the only, character in any of the Icelandic Sagas who is described as thinking or feeling anything. Ordinarily their actions are just set out, but there is one point in Egil's Saga at which the author, whoever it was, stops and tells the reader what Egil was thinking at a certain moment. Because that's so unusual you see him as a real human being. I think there's something to that.

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  2. I don't see the contradiction between the professor's take and your own. Of course outlaw tales appeal to our desire for freedom from social and legal restraint. And it's also true that the ones which survive (i.e. the ones which were published in books) are the ones that reconcile that anarchic urge with middle-class values by making the outlaw a nobleman, making his persecutors the agents of a false king, making his victims those who have conspired against the true monarch, etc. Just like any Hollywood film where the "rogue cop" is actually breaking the law and murdering dozens of people because he's fighting the REAL corruption of the law in the form of corrupt politicians in bed with drug cartels etc etc.

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    1. But how does anybody know that "those are the ones which survive"? It's pure speculation that there is a great undiscovered and undiscoverable mass of outlaw tales in which that isn't what takes place, and that reveals the medieval peasantry to be a hotbed of revolutionary idealism.

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    2. Are we supposed to believe that the preponderance of actual outlaws in medieval Europe were in fact noblemen in exile?

      My impression is that the Robin Hood myths draw on a tradition of peasant tales about typical outlaws, i.e. those that murdered and stole from wealthy travelers, but were transformed over time into a friendly middle-class tale about a nobleman who fought to restore the rightful king to the throne. I thought that the historical record contained plenty of evidence that the older tales existed, but that they were suppressed over time and today mostly don't survive in complete form.

      Wikipedia seems to support this impression:

      History of the legend
      ... In these early accounts, Robin Hood's partisanship of the lower classes... [is] already clear. ...

      In popular culture, Robin Hood is typically seen as a contemporary and supporter of the late-12th-century king Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry during the misrule of Richard's brother John while Richard was away at the Third Crusade. This view first gained currency in the 16th century. It is not supported by the earliest ballads. ...

      The oldest surviving ballad, Robin Hood and the Monk, gives even less support to the picture of Robin Hood as a partisan of the true king. ...

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    3. The Robin Hood legend is simply applying a gloss of morality to the principle of "Don't shit where you sleep."

      It makes good tactical sense for the Merry Men to not rob the poor because A: They're poor, duh. and B: As disgruntled Saxons the more you stick it to "Le Homme" the happier said peasants will be to hide you in the barn when the Sheriff's about.

      To take a real life example, Jesse and Frank James and their gang did well in their post-American Civil War banditry because they struck Union related targets in the formerly Confederate state of Missouri, where the locals idolized them and were happy to ease their way. When they got cocky and tried to move their operation to Minnesota they took a well deserved beating in the town of Northfield, where I seem to recall hearing a story of the local hardware store just handing out shotguns for the townsfolk to go after them.

      I don't have a lot of truck with the Robin Hood archetype. Robbing from the rich to give to the poor still means your robbing someone. A.K.A. "It's okay to be a jerk as long as you're being a jerk to the right target."

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    4. "It's okay to be a jerk as long as you're being a jerk to the right target."

      Motto

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    5. Picador, I think you're misunderstanding me. My objection is to the idea that you can know the contents and nature of tales which by definition weren't recorded well enough to inscribe them with some sort of historical materialist overtone, which demonstrates that medieval peasants were really Bolsheviks underneath it all who didn't quite realise it for themselves.

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    6. I was too hasty in my punchline. What I meant to say was. "I justify my awful behavior because I am a jerk to people outside the group I identify with."

      But that's not a big revelation, it was old hat before the black monoliths hipped the apes to a good use for all those spare bones and rocks they had lying around.

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  3. Back in the '80's, playing AD&D in the North East, Ray Winston's Will Scarlet - bitter, thuggish, anti-authority, seemed to mirror our Trampierish desperate characters more than the lofty ideals of Praed's Robin of Sherwood.
    Back in the '70's, the great UK DM Trevor Peach told Gary Gygax that American players didn't portray knights in D&D, only cowboys. Leone rather than Lancelot, that urge for freedom rather than status.

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    1. I think I was too young to have watched "Robin of Sherwood" at the time. I've never seen it, but something tells me that Will Scarlet had an unusual accent for somebody from Nottinghamshire....

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    2. You really should. The atmosphere it creates is impressively mythical, the cast is youthful, dumb and optimistic and Nicholas Grace is very funny as the sheriff.

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    3. For a time Robin of Sherwood played on a local station at just about the time early arrivals would show up for my once everytwo weeks game, it was a great mood setter.It served to show that while characters may have personal goals they also exsisted as part of a mythic reality and success or failure could also come reognizing their place in that.

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  4. And conversely, game or campaign milieus that place players in the hierarchy of lawful authority (i.e. servants of the king, paladins in a church order, the command crew of a Starfleet vessel, or my personal experience of running a campaign involving a government sanctioned superhero team) take a LOT of finesse to pull off properly, and often just aren't the same wiggly beast as a game involving a roving band of crime hobos.

    And axiomatic to that, games that take place in the wild frontier, be it the dark wilderness of a "points of light" style campaign or the wreckage of a post-apocalypse setting, are much more conducive to the "outlaw" than more civilized milieus. At the very least in the wild, it's easier to rationalize how much of a jerk your character is probably being. ;)

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    1. Yep, although that depends on the genre. Games like Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun or even the WoD ones sort of require an urban setting to be interesting, I think.

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    2. Yeah, but my read on both the examples you mention is that they're not *too* far off of post-apocalyptic, where outside the heavily guarded bastions of wealth and power the streets and sewers are as wild and lawless as any mutant or orc infested wilderness. The only difference is the breakdown of civil society was a slow decay instead of a big nuclear boom. Cyberpunk dystopias tend to feature feudalism with a veneer of glass, plastic, and asphalt, in my opinion.

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  5. Have you read Eric Hobsbawm's 'Bandits' - a Marxist take on banditry - the 'social bandit' - across a range of cultural and historical milleux?

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    1. No, but I have heard of it. I like Eric Hobsbawm but I also think he was more than a little bit mental.

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  6. --It sounds like a lot of balderdash to me

    Ha. Why don't people just read literature for it's own sake. Your description of Egil's Saga is more accurate for Grettir the Strong by some distance the most badass outlaw in the sagas, and a very strange dude to boot (a touch of Yosser Hughes). What I like about Egil is how in the first half it describes in close and violent detail the migration of the little chiefs of Norway because of their aristocratic temperaments from overweening kingdom-hungry Harold.

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  7. Having just finished watching Boys From The Blackstuff, Liverpudlians like noisms make me sick in my stomach with kindness and pity.

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    1. Yosser Hughes ended up being the King of Rohan so I wouldn't feel that sorry for him.

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  8. "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"

    This used to be my experience, it's not any more. I tend to associate it with adolescence, especially adolescence in a safe but dull milieu (1970s Midwestern USA, say). Most of my recent games (say 2008 onwards) have been more about the struggle to maintain order in a world spiralling into Chaos, and my players of various ages have certainly seemed generally happy and supportive of this trope. They do the right thing because it is hard, rather than trash the town because it is fun.

    I think in my personal case, realising that there was a corrupt totalitarian regime in charge (New Labour at the time) IRL probably had a big effect on the sort of games I wanted to play and the stories we created - fantasies of just and righteous authority rather than fantasies of adolescent rebellion and autonomy. I guess maybe I associate those latter fantasies with the cultural Marxist (now SJW) ideology that New Labour piggybacked in the first place. Of course Marxist academics are never going to give up their destructive fantasies, I only hope the culture as a whole will.

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  9. I expect most medieval outlaws were much like Jesse James or Billy the Kid, I do think that over time the tales tended to make them more 'respectable' as eg servants of the true king. But of course Billy the Kid wasn't really a Marxist revoloutionary, that is just Marxists projecting their own fantasies. D&D Murderhoboes are in the Billy the Kid tradition, mediated from the Western origins primarily via Conan I guess.

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  10. While the mythic lure of The Outlw can't be denied I feel some of the pull that draws RPG players to have character outlaws is the feeling that the wolrd is against them and all they can dois strike out it can feel any attempt to build will be knocked down, closeconnections a weakness to be exploited, in an information vacuum where pushing boundaries often meets violence and ruin.

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