http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\01\30\story_30-1-2010_pg3_4
PURPLE PATCH: From hero to villain -Ernest Mandel In Primitive Rebels and Bandits, Eric Hobsbawm has shown that 'social bandits' are robbers of a special type, whom the state (and the oppressor classes) regard as outlaws but who remain within the bounds of the moral order of the peasant community. It is significant that Spain, the country that gave the bandit story its name as a literary genre - the picaresque novel - was where the decay of feudalism was deepest and where the process of its decline was more protracted, leaving society in an impasse for centuries. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud showed great preference for good bandit stories, and, according to Peter Bruckner, drew a parallel between psychoanalysis and the picaresque novel which was like a mirror of society from below, dragged along the streets. The tradition of social protest and rebellion expressed in the bandit stories emerged from a mythified history and lingered on in folk tales, songs and forms of oral lore. But it was welded into literature by authors of middle class, bourgeois, or even aristocratic origin: Cervantes, Fielding, Le Sage, Defoe, Schiller, Byron, Shelley. Their works were written essentially for an upper class public - quite naturally, since they were the only ones apt to buy books at the time. A society like this can still deal with its malefactors without specialists - or at least its ideologues think it can. There is no need for a police or detective hero in these yarns, only a good lesson in Christian piety at the end. By the 18th century, of course, this was fast becoming anachronistic, and some of the Newgate Calendar stories are already showing the first deviations from the rules. But this evaporation of a sense of security had occurred among the petty bourgeoisie and the literate layers of the working class well before it did among the upper classes and high society. By the beginning of the 19th century, professional criminals, unknown in the 18th century, had become a reality. Balzac related the rise of professional criminals to the rise of capitalism and the consequent emergence of unemployment. "Each morning," he wrote in his Code des Gens Honnetes, "more than twenty thousand people (in Paris) awake with no idea of how they will eat at noon." It was hardly surprising, he added, that such circumstances led to the emergence of a class of professional criminals. The new popular theatre and popular press were, after all, businesses, and why should they not try to increase their profits and accumulate capital by catering to the public's taste for nerve tingling stories about murders, real or imagined? The rising preoccupation with crime is best exemplified by Thomas De Quincey's On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts, which appeared in 1827. De Quincey had been editor of the Westmoreland Gazette in 1818 and 1819, and had filled its columns with stories about murders and murder trials. In his 1827 essay he actually insisted upon the delectation with murder and speculation about whodunit among 'amateurs and dilettantes,' thereby opening the way to Edgar Allen Poe, Gaboriau and Conan Doyle. He also initiated the link between popular journalism and writing about murder, which would involve Dickens, Poe, Conan Doyle and so many other crime story writers, up to Dashiell Hammett, E Stanley Gardner and other contemporaries. To be sure, these are no longer 'good bandits' in the old sense. Their criminal acts are treated as the deeds of scoundrels. But they have hearts of gold nonetheless, and redeem themselves through parental devotion to more or less innocent young victims of upper-class cruelty or police persecution. They are figures of transition: no longer the noble bandits of yesteryear, but not yet the heartless villains of the 20th-century detective story. To understand why this evolution continued, why this literary genre did not stop at that transitional phase but instead went all the way in the transformation of the noble bandit into the evil criminal, we must examine both the objective function of popular literature and its ideological metamorphosis during the last half of the 19th century. It answers a need to overcome the growing monotony and standardisation of labour and consumption in bourgeois society through a harmless (since vicarious) reintroduction of adventure and drama into daily life. The romantic, bucolic setting of the old bandit stories becomes increasingly meaningless in this context. Revolt against private property becomes individualised. With motivation no longer social, the rebel becomes a thief and murderer. It is thus perfectly possible for socially critical and even socially revolutionary readers to enjoy detective stories without altering their views. But the mass of readers will not be led to seek to change the social status quo by reading crime stories, even though these stories portray conflicts between individuals and society. The criminalisation of these conflicts makes them compatible with the defence of bourgeois 'law and order'. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as 'commodities'. (The extract is taken from Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story by Ernest Mandel) Ernest Mandel was a revolutionary Marxist theorist [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
