It has been said that Guy Fawkes “was the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions.” Of course that intention was to blow the British Parliament to perdition in the notorious early Seventeenth century Gunpowder Plot. The conspiracy had to do with the Catholic resistance to Protestant persecution, and in the popular English imagination, to an attempted restoration of the Catholic church, and dreams of an English Inquisition to follow.
It was on this day in 1605 that he was discovered guarding a gigantic cache of gunpowder, which had been secreted in cellars beneath the Parliament. He was arrested, later tortured in the Tower, and eventually convicted of high treason and condemned to being hanged, drawn, and quartered, a horrendous death. There are various accounts of his execution, each somewhat different, but I like the version that says after the noose was placed around his neck, he jumped, and his neck was promptly broken, cheating the court and its terrible death.
In years following this day has become a popular English holiday, called variously Guy Fawkes Night, Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night, and Plot Night. It involved bonfires, fireworks, and on some occasions the burial of a figure of the pope.
The Wikipedia article on Guy Fawkes suggests a more positive picture of the executed traitor began with William Harrison Ainsworth’s Guy Fawkes: Or, The Gunpowder Treason, an 1841 romance. He quickly became a popular “action figure,” featured in various penny dreadfuls and other popular writings. The article continues, pointing out how Historian Lewis Call “observed that Fawkes is now ‘a major icon in modern political culture.'” Call continues, “the image of Fawkes’s face (has) became ‘a potentially powerful instrument for the articulation of postmodern anarchism’ during the late 20th century, (and continuing into the twenty-first) exemplified by the mask worn by V in the comic book series V for Vendetta, who fights against a fictional fascist English state.”
The original Fawkes is long lost. Actually even the action figure is largely forgotten. What is left is the mask of that face from V for Vendetta, the graphic novel and the movie. David Lloyd, the illustrator of the V for Vendetta and designer of the face as a mask observes how it has become a “convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny.”
That face has certainly become ubiquitous as an image of revolt against various tyrannies, real and imagined, used most famously by the Occupy movement, and the hactivist group Anonymous.
Me, I find it pretty interesting. In some ways compelling, in others repulsive.
The stuff of dreams.
And, of course, nightmares.
It’s the freedom fighter/terrorist dichotomy. When is it the one, when is it the other? And with that confusion all sorts of questions about freedom, personal and communal. And floating there, to whom are we responsible, accountable?
Rich stuff. Sometimes quite scary.
I guess the good news is that within the confusion we get to pick. Actually, we have to pick.
It’s one of those great questions of being human.
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