10
The Bandit as Symbol
We have so far looked at the reality of social bandits, and at their legend or myth chiefly as a source of information about that reality, or about the social roles bandits are supposed to play (and therefore often do), the values they are supposed to represent, their ideal – and therefore often also real – relationship with the people. Yet such legends operate not simply among those familiar with a particular bandit, or any bandits, but very much more widely and generally. The bandit is not only a man, but a symbol. In concluding this study of banditry, we must therefore also look at these remoter aspects of our subject. They are curious in at least two ways.
The bandit legend among the peasants themselves is peculiar, because the immense personal prestige of celebrated outlaws does not prevent their fame from being rather short-lived. As in so many other respects, Robin Hood, though in most ways the quintessence of bandit legend, is also rather untypical. No real original Robin Hood has ever been identified beyond dispute, whereas all other bandit heroes I have been able to check, however mythologized, can be traced back to some identifiable individual in some identifiable locality. If Robin Hood existed, he flourished before the fourteenth century, when the cycle is first recorded in writing. His legend has therefore been popular for a minimum of six hundred years. All other bandit heroes mentioned in this book (with the exception of the protagonists of the Chinese popular novels) are much more recent. Stenka Razin, the insurgent leader of the Russian poor, dates back to the 1670s, but the bulk of such figures whose legends were alive in the nineteenth century, when such ballads were systematically collected, only date back to the eighteenth – which therefore appears to be the golden age of bandit heroes: Janošik in Slovakia, Diego Corrientes in Andalusia, Mandrin in France, Rob Roy in Scotland, for that matter the criminals adapted into the social-bandit pantheon like Dick Turpin, Cartouche and Schinderhannes. Even in the Balkans, where the recorded history of haiduks and klephtes goes back to the fifteenth century, the earliest klephtic heroes who survive as such in the Greek ballads seem to be Christos Millionis (1740s) and Bukovallas, who flourished even later. It is inconceivable that men such as these should not have been the subjects of song and story earlier than this. Great brigand insurgents like Marco Sciarra of the late sixteenth century must have had their legend, and at least one of the great bandits of that extremely disturbed period – Serralonga in Catalonia – did become a popular hero whose memory survived into the nineteenth century; but this case may be unusual. Why are most of them forgotten?
It is possible that there were some changes in the popular culture of Western Europe which explain this efflorescence of bandit myths in the eighteenth century, but hard to account for what seems to be the similar chronology in Eastern Europe. One might suggest that the memory of a purely oral culture – and those who perpetuated the fame of bandit heroes were illiterate – is relatively short. Beyond a certain lapse of generations the memory of an individual merges with the collective picture of the legendary heroes of the past, the man with myth and ritual symbolism, so that a hero who happens to last beyond this span, like Robin Hood, can no longer be replaced in the context of real history. This is probably true, but not the whole truth. For oral memory can last longer than ten or twelve generations. Carlo Levi records that the peasants of the Basilicata in the 1930s remembered two episodes of history vividly though vaguely as ‘their own’: the time of the brigands seventy years ago, and the time of the great Hohenstaufen emperors seven centuries earlier. The sad truth is probably that the heroes of remote times survive because they are not only the heroes of the peasants. The great emperors had their clerks, chroniclers and poets, they left huge monuments of stone, they represent not the inhabitants of some lost corner of the highlands (which happens to be like so many other lost corners), but states, empires, entire peoples. So Skanderbeg and Marko Kraljevic survive from the Middle Ages in Albanian and Serbian epics, but Mihat the Herdsman and Juhasz Andras (Andras the Shepherd) against whom
no gun has any power,
the balls which the Pandurs aim against him
he catches in his naked hand,1
disappear in time. The great bandit is stronger, more famous, his name lives longer than the ordinary peasant’s, but he is no less mortal. He is immortal only because there will always be some other Mihat or Andras to take his gun into the hills or on to the wide plains.
The second peculiarity is more familiar.
Bandits belong to the peasantry. If the argument of this book is accepted, they cannot be understood except in the context of the sort of peasant society which, it is safe to guess, is as remote from most readers as ancient Egypt, and which is as surely doomed by history as the Stone Age. Yet the curious and astonishing fact about the bandit myth is that its appeal has always been far wider than its native environment. German literary historians have invented a special literary category, the Räuberromantik (‘bandit romanticism’) which has produced a large and by no means only Germanic supply of Räuberromane (‘bandit novels’), none of them designed for reading by either peasants or bandits. The purely fictional bandit hero, a Rinaldo Rinaldini or Joaquin Murieta, is its characteristic by-product. But more remarkable still, the bandit hero survives the modern industrial revolution of culture, to appear, in his original form in television series about Robin Hood and his merry men, in a more modern version as the Western or gangster hero, in the mass media of the late-twentieth-century urban life.
That the official culture of countries in which social banditry is endemic, should reflect its importance, is natural. Cervantes put the celebrated Spanish robbers of the late sixteenth century into his works, as naturally as Walter Scott wrote about Rob Roy. Hungarian, Romanian, Czechoslovak and Turkish writers devote novels to real or imaginary bandit heroes, while – a slight twist – a modernizing Mexican novelist anxious to discredit the myth, attempts to cut the hero down to the size of ordinary criminals in Los Bandidos del Rio Frio.* In such countries both bandits and bandit myths are important facts of life, impossible to overlook.
The bandit myth is also comprehensible in highly urbanized countries which still possess a few empty spaces of ‘outback’ or ‘west’ to remind them of a sometimes imaginary heroic past, and to provide a concrete locus for nostalgia, a symbol of ancient and lost virtue, a spiritual Indian territory for which, like Huckleberry Finn, man can imagine himself ‘lighting out’ when the constraints of civilization become too much for him. There the outlaw and bushranger Ned Kelly still rides, as in the paintings of the Australian Sidney Nolan, a ghostly figure, tragic, menacing and fragile in his homemade armour, crossing and re-crossing the sun-bleached Australian hinterland, waiting for death.
Nevertheless there is more to the literary or popular cultural image of the bandit than the documentation of contemporary life in backward societies, the longing for lost innocence and adventure in advanced ones. There is what remains when we strip away the local and social framework of brigandage: a permanent emotion and a permanent role. There is freedom, heroism, and the dream of justice.
The myth of Robin Hood stresses the first and the third of these ideals. What survives from the medieval greenwood to appear on the television screen is the fellowship of free and equal men, the invulnerability to authority, and the championship of the weak, oppressed and cheated. The classical version of the bandit myth in high culture insists on the same elements. Schiller’s robbers sing of the free life in the forest, while their chief, the noble Karl Moor, gives himself up that the reward for his capture can save a poor man. The Western and the gangster film insist on the second, the heroic element, even against the obstacle of conventional morality which confines heroism to the good, or at least the morally ambiguous gunman. Yet there is no denying it. The bandit is brave, both in action and as victim. He dies defiantly and well, and unnumbered boys from slums and suburbs, who possess nothing but the common but nevertheless precious gift of strength and courage, can identify themselves with him. In a society in which men live by subservience, as ancillaries to machines of metal or moving parts of human machinery, the bandit lives and dies with a straight back. As we have seen, not every legendary bandit of history survives thus, to feed the dreams of urban frustration. In fact, hardly any of the great bandits of history survive the translation from agrarian to industrial society, except when they are virtually contemporary with it, or when they have already been embalmed in that resistant medium for time-travel, literature. Chapbooks about Lampião are printed today among the skyscrapers of São Paulo because every one of the millions of first-generation migrants from the Brazilian north-east knows about the great cangaçeiro who was killed in 1938, i.e. in the actual lifetimes of all who are more than sixty-two years old. Contrariwise, twentieth-century Englishmen and Americans know about Robin Hood ‘who took from the rich and gave to the poor’ and twentieth-century Chinese about ‘the Opportune Rain Sung Chiang . . . who helps the needy and looks lightly upon silver’, because writing and printing transformed a local and spoken tradition into a national and permanent form. One might say that the intellectuals have ensured the survival of the bandits.
In a sense, they still do so today. The rediscovery of the social bandits in our time is the work of intellectuals – of writers, of film-makers, even of historians. This book is part of the re-discovery. It has tried to explain the phenomenon of social banditry, but also to present heroes: Janošik, Sandor Rósza, Dovbuš, Doncho Vatach, Diego Corrientes, Jancu Jiano, Musolino, Giuliano, Bukovallas, Mihat the Herdsman, Andras the Shepherd, Santanon, Serralonga and Garcia, an endless battle-order of warriors, swift as stags, noble as falcons, cunning as foxes. Except for a few, nobody ever knew them thirty miles from their place of birth, but they were as important to their people as Napoleons or Bismarcks; almost certainly more important than the real Napoleon and Bismarck. Nobody who is insignificant has several hundred songs made about him, like Janošik. They are songs of pride, and of longing:
The cuckoo has called
On the dry branch
They have killed Shuhaj
And times are hard now.2
For the bandits belong to remembered history, as distinct from the official history of books. They are part of the history which is not so much a record of events and those who shaped them, as of the symbols of the theoretically controllable but actually uncontrolled factors which determine the world of the poor: of just kings and men who bring justice to the people. That is why the bandit legend still has power to move us. Let us leave the last word to Ivan Olbracht, who has written better about it than almost anyone else.
Man has an insatiable longing for justice. In his soul he rebels against a social order which denies it to him, and whatever the world he lives in, he accuses either that social order or the entire material universe of injustice. Man is filled with a strange, stubborn urge to remember, to think things out and to change things; and in addition he carries within himself the wish to have what he cannot have – if only in the form of a fairy tale. That is perhaps the basis for the heroic sagas of all ages, all religions, all peoples and all classes.3
Including ours. That is why Robin Hood is our hero too, and will remain so.