In paid subscriberland, my re-serialization of Escape From Starshire continues. I will also begin a series sharing my thoughts on a Top 100 favorites list I shared with a paid subscriber recently. You don’t wanna miss that!
The other day, I got a book on Jesse James. The subject of one of my favorite American folk songs; which is another way of saying ‘I am now a very happy man.’ I am, after all, from the West. In general I’m not a big fan of romanticizing villains - I am not a mafia lit or movie guy, for instance. But I make an exception for Wild West outlaws and buccaneers. Perhaps the lack of a state power in control of that area differentiates these criminals from the others?
I was just thinking: does that make me a statist? I’ll have to think about that.
Because Jesse James is a legend, I was prepared to recognize the biography as a myth-busting affair. I knew he was an outlaw and that Robin Hood comparisons of the past would likely not hold water. (A Robin Hood, in the Wild West? Amusing.) What I didn’t expect to learn was that James’ Confederate sympathies would lead the biographer to call him a proto-terrorist, or even simply a terrorist. As the book was published in 2002, I can see why that word would be used liberally back then.
But was he a terrorist or simply an outlaw and a rebel? And how many of us would equally apply that to, say, John Brown? We get into “he said she said,” which is outright foolish. I will find out when I read the book. But putting aside whatever biases and sentiments we have about the Civil War and the Confederacy, the author in the Prologue asks a very meaningful question: “Why should one set of criminals be so much more memorable than another?” James was hardly alone, after all. And yet he’s the legend.
Immediately the use of the word ‘terrorist’ is problematic because the notoriety of jihadis, for instance, stems from the high-level nature of their attacks and the number of people they kill. Then there’s the whole “terrorist vs. freedom fighter” conversation, which takes us nowhere because it falls in the same category as “what came first, the chicken or the egg” or even the revolting question of whether I should kill baby Hitler if I go back in time. It takes us nowhere.
Add to that the more complicated relationship we have had with homegrown terrorists. The American left does not view eco-terrorists, for instance, as being an enemy. And there is evidence (albeit anecdotal evidence I’ve encountered in life) to show that even the Unabomber’s reputation as a thinker might win out in the distant future over his reputation as a terrorist. His case is interesting because if and when the need for the word ‘terrorist’ subsides and time heals the pain caused by the mail bombs, historians might find that the Unabomber had more in common with someone like James or Brown than someone like Osama Bin Laden. It’s possible. Was the Unabomber, in fact, an outlaw?
Acquiring this book comes right after I happened to read about another individual retrospectively considered a terrorist: Gavrilo Princip. I always like bringing him up because his name and legacy draw out curious feelings about a war that, for the most part, we believe to be just history. Including myself: while I certainly do not condone the assassination of the Archduke and his wife, there is a lot that can be unpacked regarding what that scenario says about the anti-Slavic worldview of the West. In this case, as it pertains to the Serbs. There is also the fact that Princip makes for a convenient scapegoat for the entire World War, conveniently removing responsibility for the gas and the trenches and so on from those who actually declared war, manufactured the gas and so on. I do not think it is fair to place complete responsibility for military elite warmongering on one guy’s shoulders.
It would make for a good Cernobog’s Shadow post, actually. For the purposes of this post, however, I will just say that objectively it is erroneous to call Princip a terrorist. He was an assassin by definition. Princip did not kill innocent people to stoke fear in the populace as a way of furthering his pro-Yugoslav aims. (He was not a Serbian nationalist: this was a lie concocted by the Austrians to justify invading Serbia) He meant to kill the Archduke alone.
This is where we come to literature.
A curious, almost paradoxical component of historical fiction is its recollection of the past by mixing both historicity and contemporary language. Historical fiction is a negotiation with that past: it is an act of translation as much as a work of art. It is for this reason that even as the genre tends to collect a lot of generic authors who add little to nothing to historical negotiation, the best historical fiction can be counted among the best literature ever written.
Let’s say I want to write a novel about Princip. Or James. Or the Unabomber, for that matter. In post-9/11 American English, the word ‘terrorist’ has been very successfully disseminated. So much so that it has become extremely convenient to label anyone who killed anyone for a political motive a terrorist. Even though terrorism is as much a strategy as it is the behavior of a murderer. Even school shooters have been called that, with Woke ideologues attempting to frame White people as a school shooter race and therefore as a terrorist race. I’m sure that will neutralize the school shooter phenomenon and bring peace to our society right away!
For this reason, it feels perfectly normal to use ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism’ as part of the contemporary language needed to allow readers to partake in the historical negotiation at play here. But is it historically accurate? If James and Princip aren’t terrorists - the former a rebel and outlaw, the latter an assassin - then I am engaging in falsehood and historical revisionism. Much as the word ‘terrorist’ assists in reader comprehension, is it fair to the reader and to our historical subjects to lie about them? And is this not a betrayal of literary humanism? To call someone a ‘terrorist,’ after all, is not a compliment. And its efficacy as a tarnishing word, surprisingly, remains very stable when other ostensibly stronger words have lost their power through facile repetition and overuse.
There is, to be sure, no law of the universe claiming that writers cannot engage in historical revisionism; many have done it. In some cases it is even necessary if we don’t know enough facts about a certain time. But the best historical fiction authors - Sir Walter Scott and Henryk Sienkiewicz - were NOT historical revisionists. They did their research. Their allegiance to historicity was ironclad. The characters were fictional, but for a very good reason: it is much easier, and probably better, to place oneself in the time period rather than occupy the mind of a real person, of whom the author would have to faithfully reflect the whole time.
The other great of historical fiction - Alexandre Dumas - was a lot more loose with history. But this was in service of his great strength: amazingly picaresque plots. If Dumas wasn’t always right about everything, readers of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are never in disbelief because they don’t feel that Dumas is trying to pull a fast one on them. Dumas’ contribution to the genre was distinct, even unique: if Sir Walter Scott had constructed the car, Dumas filled it with gas; while Sienkiewicz, later on, ensured the oiled machine functioned smoothly. (Those wanting to understand the role of historical fiction’s other grand master, Leo Tolstoy, should read Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox)
Historical revision began with Marxists. One of the great works of historical revisionism was Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo. It attempted to portray the revered scientist as an atheist proto-revolutionary: a depiction Galileo himself would have held in contempt since he had been a pious man. We now know that Galileo wasn’t even punished for his heliocentrism, but because he insulted the pride of his friend, the Pope, who permitted Galileo to lay out his heliocentrism argument. The play, as a result, hasn’t aged well. But the same, unfortunately, cannot be said about the legacy of Marxists like Brecht and their willingness to play God with facts in the name of a petty revolutionary impulse. The impulse that leads down the road to Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth.
The word ‘terrorism’ is not, to my knowledge, one of Marxism’s classic defamatory words. But its function is more or less the same. The reason why labeling Jesse James as a terrorist doesn’t distance me from his folkloric heroism is because we need our rebellious heroes to set examples. Ever since I started paying more attention to mainstream discourse - about ten years ago - it hasn’t escaped my notice that a narrative attempting to defame a lot of humanity’s homegrown rebels has been increasing in potency and the number of talkings heads the narrative collects. While the legacy of Princip is not a simple one in the Balkans, something similar is happening to many others who fit the profile. (It has, thankfully, not caught on in West Slavia where the outlaw, Juraj Janosik, remains a bonafide hero in both Slovakia and Poland)
By labeling these people as terrorists, society is performing a precise, if forceful, operation on itself. Like removing a limb, it is removing a cultural mechanism through which people aspire for justice in times of injustice. By defaming and corrupting the legacy of outlaw heroes like Jesse James, the state and society are emptying the world of human comfort in the abstract sense. They are robbing people of hope. The fact that James most probably would not have had my interests at heart doesn’t change our mythological need for hope. And by that I mean the real, sincere need for it: not the fake, Hollywood hope we now associate with the word. A hope that society and its organs would love to destroy within us.
There is only one demographic of people who can change that: writers.
Words like ‘terrorist’ systematize the corruption of people’s legacies to ensure the dominance of the bureaucratic OneState realizing itself before our very eyes. Would Jesse James have been my friend? Doubtful. But he was the enemy of OneState by virtue of being an enemy of the state in general. We require nothing more from him and his ghost; not even stolen rich people’s money to give to the poor.
Much as there is a risk of sacrificing reader comfort by eschewing (or treating very carefully) words like terrorist, authorial responsibility to society is not restricted to pleasing the reader’s every whim - with respect to the reader, of course. Writers must also cultivate the English language. Keep it healthy. And - with the assistance of literary humanism - enhance moral consciousness. Writers should not be afraid of tinkering with history. But using the word ‘terrorist’ in the examples given is historical revisionism and should be avoided. Literature cannot engage in its greater directives if it readily embraces lies of this magnitude. The art of fiction is already severely distrusted by an increasing number of readers nowadays who perceive fiction as synonymous with a lie. That’s a false equivalence, of course. But me saying that here doesn’t change the reality of how people continue to disregard what they perceive to be a fantasy.
The truth is: we need outlaws. A lot more than we’ve been indoctrinated to believe. The good news is that no one need die, as people did in Jesse James’ time. No Union trains need be robbed, even. Authors can fill the void and ride on horseback into the sunset with pens instead of revolvers. Whether authors have the courage to become the outlaws we desperately need is another question.
Why do you think we need outlaws in the great human story? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
Scott, Dumas, Sienkiewicz and Tolstoy understood that history was their friend but not their absolute master. And occasionally they played for the other team in non-fiction: one of Scott's later productions was a multi-volume biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Tangental to your main point, where I went to college, the James-Younger gang met their end (1876). They killed the college treasurer (a Union veteran) because he refused to open a bank safe. As you may know, the local farmers shot them up and the gang survivors fled. But it isn't common knowledge that they burned a dozen grain mills as they fled. Also I've heard that they picked one of the banks there to rob because a Union general was one of the owners. It seems like they were continuing the war, or maybe having revenge. Jesse and Frank James escaped but the others did not. When I was a student there, you could buy at the supermarket period photographs on postcards of their bullet-ridden corpses. Your main point is our human need for outlaws, symbols and story-carriers of resistance to the bureaucratic One State, and I agree. This can co-exist in fiction, song and myth, with a dislike of real criminals and murderers. There may be an inconsistency there but that's okay, an irritant can help the story, tell it all.