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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 213-228 Time of the Outlaw All it takes is a line to start the problem. Not the loyalty line that Johnny Cash claimed he would walk close-heartedly for his first wife Vivian Liberto. He was thinking wishfully and probably lying when he wrote it. That was in Texas in 1956, tinkering with a song that he wanted to call “Because You’re Mine” and “resisting the temptation to be unfaithful,” as he says in his autobiography (Cash 57-8). But everybody knows that drunk-hearted men meet don’t stay sober too long. They start messing again with honky-tonk angels or nearly demolish their lives with tougher vices. This was the Cash trajectory in that free, innocent era before HIV and widespread coke snorting changed everything in the early 1980s. He went through the ‘60s hooked on amphetamines, reeling from gig to gig, until wife #2 – who happened to be June Carter – lectured and prayed ‘im and finally hounded ‘im out of his habit. He was the pill and alcohol type, not the jaunty cocaine addict in the Leadbelly version of “Take a Whiff on Me,” which was recorded at a Louisiana penitentiary in 1934. But jail was always an imaginary topos for Cash. Contrary to legends, he wasn’t ever a jailbird, but that’s where he set his best song, “Folsom Prison Blues,” and made his greatest album – Johnny Cash: At Folsom Prison. And that’s where we find the line, one of the most notorious lyrics ever written: “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Cash quotes it as a single unpunctuated line in the autobiography, and tells how he sat with pen in hand, “trying to think up the worst reason a person could have for killing another person, and that’s what came to mind. It did come to mind quite easily, though” (57). The fact that it came so easily and sounds so right (as a murder fantasy, an avant-garde experiment) is what’s indigestible about it, and it starts the problem: how to think the violence of the outlaw in relation to law and culture, and how to find the line where the outlaw divides from the same miserable criminal that rots away in Folsom. What the law condemns and puts asunder, into detention, or puts to death, is what the culture finds cause to celebrate. The “culture” isn’t a single thing, but its multiple fields (the arts, academic scholarship, mass media, etc.) have shared and borrowed each other’s stories and fixated on the same icons. Law and culture take up contending positions when it comes to the criminal, and this difference is magnified in the legends that [end page 213] grow up around the figure of the outlaw. Each is interested in a different type of subjectivity. Law usually takes a narrowed, positivistic approach in which the criminal is a subject that intends and executes illegal acts, violating explicit statutes and collectively held social norms. Literature, on the other hand, explores the full range of criminal subjectivity and prefigures psychological and sociological studies of the criminal personality. So what’s the relationship between law and culture when it comes to outlaw violence, both its specificity in varying historical circumstances and its mythological coding as a resistance weapon, a transgressive rebuttal to domination? Is there some sort of crypto-dialectic here between law, with its complex institutional apparatus, and the wild estrangement licensed by culture? A dialectic for which the outlaw is a pivot figure, the world-historical loser who, in his highest transfiguration, comes on like Jesus, himself the king of criminals? Haply enough, Jesus – whom Cash, like any good American loved and praised – returned at the outset of the third millennium, draped in the vestments of his original milieu. He appeared as a tall, Islamic anti-Christ featured with that same Yemenite physiognomy that we see so delicately portrayed in Holman Hunt’s famous Victorian painting, “The Light of the World.” What are we saying, then? That only the contradictions and inversions count? Zeugmatically with the Rolling Stones, that every cop’s a criminal, and all the sinners saints? Or that he who fucks nuns will later join the Church? Or that prisons are built with the stones of law and brothels with bricks of religion? Yes, but more than this. If we want to explain the automatic appeal of that Cash line and why it reads us deeply, or why palms were strewn at bin Laden’s feet on 9-11, then we better interrogate the outlaw and his starring role in certain cultural and social sectors. (Incidentally, it will remain “he” and “his” across most of this paper, mainly for the sake of syntactic eloquence, though there is a whole range of female crime that could be profitably considered here as well.) If, under the strict terms of dialectic, which is both a rope-a-dope tactic and a pummelling combination of force and logic, we want to think on the outlaw and expound his violence, then it’s imperative that we start the problem with a good old-fashioned base-and-superstructure analysis, for there’s no avoiding the criminal foundations of social stability. Marx wrote that [a] philosopher produces ideas, a poet verses, a parson sermons, a professor textbooks, etc. A criminal produces crime. But if the relationship between this latter branch of production and the whole productive activity of society is examined a little more closely, one is forced to abandon a number of prejudices. The criminal [end page 214] produces not only crime but also the criminal law; he produces the professor who delivers lectures on this criminal law, and even the inevitable textbook in which the professor presents his lectures as a commodity for sale in the market. There results an increase in material wealth, quite apart from the pleasures which the author himself derives from the manuscript of his textbook. The least we can say of this mighty passage is that the linkage of crime to production has been theorized rather over-productively. Marx is quite the Foucauldian, and too conscientious. But the point is indisputable: crime can be sourced like any other raw material, and this is much to the benefit of the social order, which assimilates and transmutes the prodigious range of criminal inventiveness into its own disciplinary apparatus and value systems. Crime is mortared throughout the social structure. The criminal becomes a suppressed collaborator in those sciences and those representations that construct his identity (legal, moral, psychological, cultural, etc.). Somewhere in The Anti Christ, Nietzsche scoffs that Christianity had robbed chance of its innocence. Marx suggests that capitalism has done the same to crime. Behind his analysis stands the history of the bourgeois state: crime is recognized as a foundational phenomenon that cannot be eradicated or left to the resolutions of sub-state actors such as the clan, the religious community, or the avenging individual. But if crime now suffuses the modern capitalist order as a useful and intrinsic element in the economy of domination, does this mean that we are at the end of the era of the outlaw? Certainly not, for neither political economy – which made crime over into criminology – nor social [end page 215] repression – which already in the early modern era gave rise to the greenwood myth of Robin Hood –, can determine the appearance or reappearance of this figure. Like the imaginary spectre that Marx conjures in the first lines of The Communist Manifesto, the outlaw keeps re-emerging from behind the productivism of his criminal disguise. He comes as a manifesto figure. His message is scepticisim and rebellion, which are, respectively, philosophical and socio-political issues. In concrete, historical terms, the outlaw personifies the social violence latent in scepticism. And this means, potentially, scepticism of anything totalistic – the religion of the communist, capitalist, or fundamentalist state; neoliberalism and globalization; the war on drugs, the war on terror. In culture, the outlaw is an archetype with which to disown, temporarily, the moral and political constitution of the world. This is what it means for “culture” to be a separate sphere from “society.” The scepticism of the outlaw is expressed through crime, universally denounced as a dangerous and socially disruptive phenomenon. But in culture, the outlaw’s crimes and his violence are represented as a type of radical questioning. The outlaw’s cause is nothing but this disposition toward sceptical questioning. It means that he can play the role of a social critic or a revolutionary fighter, but his enduring appeal lies in the mystery of crime itself – the indeterminacies it can open up in the moral and legal fields; not to speak of the bizarre riches that it leaves over for psychology or the materials it affords to the artistic imagination. This is the point at which the lines between culture and society, between legendary archetypes and actual criminals, must therefore be re-blurred The spur-of-the-moment homicide in the Cash song is stunning proof of the rupturing power of crime and violence, which breaks out in culture as a force of vicarious liberation. That such a “liberation” may be short-lived, formless, and utterly delusive, is another matter. The song continues playing, appealing to its free and criminal fan-base, and piling up real royalties. If law consistently identifies crime as a positive wrong, culture tends to valorize the outlaw’s transgressions as visionary acts and extensions of experimental consciousness. The outlaw may not be clear-sighted about himself. He may be selfish, homicidal, fanatical, or mad – or all of these in sequence. But he alienates us, gladly, from the coercive protection of the state and its official history, which usually means the positive law and the deceitful moral comforts of its justice. This is why Robin Hood and Stagolee (this is one of the available spellings), or Belle Starr and Phoolan Devi, or for that matter bin Laden and his cohorts, are or will be celebrated in song and story, and why they manage to occupy the same generic category, no matter how much they diverge from each other in their best or their worst intentions. In one and [end page 216] the same figure, the outlaw can be the would-be founder of a new moral order or the pioneer of a higher form of freedom; and, simultaneously, nothing but a brigand and a murderer. (I am paraphrasing from that superlative opening paragraph of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas.) But the outlaw isn’t, at bottom, defined by his evasions of the sheriff or by those dissimulations played out in the full face of legal power. For example, when one acts as a law-abiding citizen while resisting inwardly and quietly plotting the subversion of a given order – this latter is called criminal conspiracy. In seeking after the outlaw as an ontological category, it doesn’t matter what the magnitude of the crime is, or what economic, political, cultural, or psycho-social factors affect illegal behaviour. The outlaw separates from the criminal on questions that reach beyond the positive law. The chief of these is the question of justice, which, as far as the legal system goes, and as far as the state apparatus operates, is not the transcendental priority that it is purported to be, but is something that “gets done” or “not done” in the interpretation of a statute. Justice is the positive outcome of a legal process. It is the expressed, juridical will of an empowered apparatus, a context-bound ruling that follows certain formal operations. Its decisiveness is proclaimed as the measure of a moral or ethical norm. But this type of categorical slippage – from hermeneutics to rulings, which are then hypostatized into transcendental norms – promises trouble. It is far from apodictic and it opens a role for the outlaw. One of the legal determinations that define a criminal act is the question of jurisdiction, which, in the most general sense, refers to the administrative boundaries within which a court can exercise its authority. The nature and place of the crime determines who has the right to try it, and where. A judge in a lower court, such as the Ontario Court of Justice, lacks jurisdiction in a murder case. A Justice of the Peace has no jurisdiction to try a criminal case of any sort. And, of course, higher courts such as the Canadian Court of Appeals have the authority to reverse a lower court decision. But to the outlaw these scales of jurisdiction are materially extraneous. His revolt and his exile raise the problem of jurisdiction above the positive law. He is not contemptuous but radically dialectical: deeds being words, he exposes the illegality of the law’s universal justice. This is the point on which the outlaw tests the world’s tolerance for metaphysical freedom and strikes, not simply at the law, but at the concept of worldwide justice itself. Justice is a legal act and, technically, proof of a court’s right to bind and coerce in the name of a particular political authority. It is indissoluble from the exercise of power and the construction of particular interests, and therefore, says the outlaw, has no jurisdiction, no right to a legal interest in my situation. [end page 217] If I overstate the outlaw’s cause as a rejection of the law’s nominalism, it is only to magnify his cultural role and the latitude allowed for his violence – as if outlaw violence were at bottom only symbolic. It is no wonder that culture, high and low, is tempted into an admiration of this figure, no matter how lowly in the hierarchy of crime or how dangerous to the social order. What needs to be underscored, outside the handful of stereotypical storylines of the urban gangster’s or frontier gambler’s career, is that the criminal becomes an outlaw when he reaches that point when reasoned response (including surrender) to the positive law is no longer an option; when he must, instead, enter into an asymmetrical, crypto-dialectic with the law. That means: to usurp the option of violence and strip justice of its right to decide the legal and moral conditions of its use. The outlaw is not a figure in world folklore because he has come to exact retaliation for puny local lives ruined by corruptions or anomalies of the cops and the local courts, or because whole societies and long historical epochs – such as the European imperial period in the Americas, culminating with U.S. dominance of the Northern continent and the Caribbean basin – have subsisted on the criminal exploitation or mass murder of others. Yes he is a figure in world folklore for just this reason, and yes modern revolutionary glamour does become him (though the toils of the day-to-day struggle are sure to leave no one smelling or looking like a rose). But the point of the outlaw, the reason for his roguish, vernacular fame and the respect, if not the intrinsic favour that he enjoys, is that he is a simplifier and violent ironist. What he simplifies is, of course, the travesty that names itself justice. This is what divides the outlaw from the criminal. Yet this simplifying movement is itself a glaring irony of the most primitivist sort, for no one ever remembers the world being simple, or monolingual, or tax-free. These dreams belong to childhood, and the childhood of the world, like the state of the world before a calamity or a crime has maimed someone (such as a twelve-year-old Third World child lured or sold into sex acts with Western men), is precisely what justice can’t restore. The outlaw enjoys our perennial favour because the world has always been full of dirty bargains, of deceptions and interdependencies, of covert and overt combat and competition; and because the law, with its pretension to regulating these cross-purposes and cynically expedient alliances in the name of objectivity, fairness, or justice, has to be accordingly complex, as Marx described, and an extension of the ruling interest. International law, with its impotence in matters where justice is most flagrantly compromised, is the sorriest proof of this. Statesmen are legalized thieves and criminals – and this includes, by any studied, objective standards, such liberators of Europe as Churchill and Stalin, and almost every [end page 218] American president from at least Vietnam onwards. But the everyday criminal, the local “rounder” whose life is a tale of thefts, assaults, and so on, is the truly useful proletarian here. He is a statistical figure and a social menace. He thus vindicates the law in its function and perpetuates its innate triumphalism. The outlaw, meanwhile, acts doubly, in two dimensions. He occupies the criminal field, certainly. But the larger circumstances of his actions, criminal as these may be, compel the law to expose itself as a contrivance, a structure, an array of powers for which justice is the last and uttermost illusion. Greil Marcus wrote that “Stagerlee is Malcolm X before he became politically conscious. Livin’ in the hoodlum world” (65). Which one is the outlaw, the dim and anonymous figure from the blues tradition or the black militant moving freely through the public field? The question goes on, while the outlaw remains at large, lurking somewhere in the interstitial gaps of the social order or running truculently beyond its boundaries. Thanks to folk tradition and the lies of poets, he belongs to an ersatz social species. If high justice occupies his mind, he’s like Michael Kohlhaas stalking the Junker and burning Germany (all because of an incident at a toll barrier and some confiscated horses). Or like Lenin in a sealed train, coming to topple the prim figures posed atop the Czarist wedding cake. These are one variant of the outlaw: the revolutionary who holds to a unilateral fantasy of sovereign justice and wants to punish the world for its hypocrisy or its cadaverous, imperial appetite. But most outlaws aren’t vanguard actors for the world spirit. They have low-rent proletarian credentials. Circumstances and temperament have made them pimps and gangsters. They can be surly drifters who sleep in graveyards or illiterate, high-noon cowboys who shoot lethally from a bow-legged silhouette. The point is that the outlaw will first kill for a Stetson or a slutty woman. It’s only later that he drops his surliness and withering misery, and acquires political vision. The “crypto” relationship between the law and the outlaw is radical precisely because it revives a confrontation with the origins of law in retributive violence. Just as our positive, institutional law is said to have originated in measured vengeance, or the lex talionis, so the figure of the outlaw must first be understood as he who reminds the law of its origins and its destiny: its beginnings in the exaction of blood, and its destiny, which is primitive retribution (the old law of the claw) raised to the level of a punitive rite. With or without the death penalty at its disposal, the criminal justice system can never quite forswear these origins. Vengeance was once a means of brokering family and clan relations through retributive violence. The law evolved from this (so the story goes) and prevailed up aggrieved parties so that they foreswore violence as a means [end page 219] of direct redress. The judgment of a wrong and the application of a penalty would henceforth be decided by an objective third-party. But the outlaw offers another perspective. He reminds us that the law is not or can neither make its violence transcendentally disinterested nor repress it so well that its justice seem fair and proper. He is likewise sceptical of its universal pretensions: the law, like the state whose arm it is, cannot be accepted as the totality that it must seem to be. The legal system remains grounded in these primitive beginnings, where violence was retributive and served as the chief mechanism of the law. The ultimate outlaw, the “terrorist,” is proof of this. He is afforded no tolerable social status as any ordinary criminal might have. The terrorist is to be killed on sight and, if captured, may be detained without charge, tortured in order to elicit confessions that would presumably save lives and safeguard that most sacred of contemporary values, sacred even to a point of pre-emptive attacks on others or genocides of national minorities: the sacred cow called “national security.” The mere suspicion of terrorism or terrorist involvement may be a guarantee of legal oblivion: secret tribunals and suspension of habeas corpus, undisclosed evidence and denial of the right to counsel – techniques that would have satisfied the single-minded zeal of Torquemada. But the terrorist’s fate at the hands of the state is only a small token of what the neo-colonial war machine unleashes on resistant populations. Those that it sets out to kill or neutralize are less than enemies: they are superfluous. The anonymity and the quantity of their death conforms to the utilitarian logic of modern rule and the infinite thrust of the instruments (the science and technology sectors, the planetary trade flow, the world-wide projection of military power, the entertainment and communications networks, etc.) with which modern powers can manufacture a global world. Yet despite this restlessness, this systematizing, thrusting, manufacturing and murdering of everything – processes which are almost like crimes beyond the boundaries of the punishable – , the outlaw returns to haunt the new, unimaginable order that is somehow all too actually ripping up history and anything else that stands in its way. It is through the Guantanamo-era terrorist, who is indeed, given the nature of the world system, a counter-terrorist, that the ordinary rule of domestic law is finally exposed as nothing more than a stabilization game. It keeps the citizens in a productive lock-down, and it reminds us – as Marx argued – that the ordinary citizen is nothing if he or she is not also, potentially, a criminal, a useful social resource. No such luck for the terrorist, however. Terrorism is counted as crime and for this reason can shed a dubious light on the role of the criminal law. But the terrorist is portrayed and treated as a demonic outlaw, not a criminal, for the criminal belongs to the world of due process, no matter how corrupted by money or racism or other interests. [end page 220] Yet the terrorist is but one extreme version of the outlaw. The pettiest and most egotistical of criminals becomes an outlaw when his actions, if not necessarily his conscious, clearly articulated intentions, exile and isolate him in a zone beyond the law’s coercive protection. Exile is the appropriate word, for it indicates that the outlaw does ab ovo have a home – it is, or it would be, if he could have it and find it again, a home within the boundaries of the law and the social group whose unity it secures. But the outlaw, by definition, remains exilic, spatially and psychologically, and this exile is perilous. “Everybody,” writes Eric Hobsbawm, “was entitled to kill the outlaw, because no authority was in a position to apply their law to him” (14). Hobsbawm’s italics underscore the pressures that shape the special isolation of the outlaw. Even among henchmen or fellow bandits, his social relations are restricted, shot through with plotting and paranoia. Moreover, both song and story have made the outlaw’s almost creaturely isolation into a metaphysical mystery where the problem of his unsanctioned freedom is concentrated into a condition of temporal anguish. That anguish may be feverish or unendurably monotonous. Macbeth has both. It is one of the great, canonical studies of this condition. The outlaw is besieged by an equivocal spell that seems to set out the conditions of his total freedom from everything except the unpredictable pregnancy of time. He is isolated by his delusions, as under a moving dome where time is an indeterminate and sleepless experience. Close examination of almost any cultural document reveals – perhaps only in the space of a single line or a solitary image – that outlaw time is never the diffuse, distended, immanently coherent time of the standardized civil reality. This latter is majoritarian, horizontal time, which in its capitalist form is mapped rationally and functionally by clock and calendar. It is the time of social routine and personal integration into a normative order whose disruptions or breakdowns are subject to corrective supervision by administrators or the forceful, stabilizing intervention of legal and political authorities. Appointments, schedules, returned phone calls, even surprise meetings with long-lost acquaintances, all underscore our belonging to a distended and metonymic totality of temporal networks. The realist novel, with its replete background furnishings, its scrupulously plotted chain of accumulated incidents, and its presentation of bourgeois consciousness as a durational consistency, was the mimetic analogue to this time. But the vertical time of the outlaw has an older cultural genealogy than the modernity of the nineteenth century novel. The outlaw continues to re-emerge as a cultural presence even in the midst of modernity and its various posts-. Vertical time is not historically dead, though there are few, at least in advanced [end page 221] intellectual circles, who conspire to believe in kerygmatic theology or the portents of Biblical revelation, which is where one is most likely to encounter fantasies of a vertical end-time these days. Terrorist time is vertical time. It flashes up as an obscure but instantaneous presence. It is instantaneous because it “occurs” as an act of unmanageable crime and gets rid of every other type of “present.” A gaping hole is blown right through the heart of the social totality; history stands unconsolidated; the outlaw rises again, spectrally, up from beyond the horizon of normative time and its regulated or surveilled spaces. He threatens, in fact, to collapse that horizon around himself, especially if his or her terrorism is “world-class” Whoever he is, whatever the politics, the outlaw fascinates because he opens up the secret channel of a dialectic. This fascination, however, can entail a terrible cost. If you want to emulate the outlaw by attacking the system, not least because of its unbearable arrogance and its third-rate masquerade of “freedom” and “democracy,” you’d better be well-organized and ready to take losses. Make your militancy strategic and keep your weapons at the ready. No other type of scepticism can hope to clash on the system’s ear. But no political order can countenance such a challenge, just as no legal system can accommodate the subjectivity of the outlaw. Its mechanisms aren’t suited to that. This is why the outlaw haunts legend and popular culture, including public memory. His pathos and his predicaments are existential, and yet they promise something that history in all its violence and its seemingly limitless complexity hasn’t yet been able to say. History, like certain social climates, may be ironic or demoralized because of its “progress,” its wealth, or its “justice,” but it can never be sceptical of itself. That type of critique must come unforeseeably from elsewhere. The outlaw is not merely a vicarious figure in popular culture or a revolutionary rebel who temporarily drains off uncontrollable social energies until he is killed or his cause is won and he is converted into a mainstream hero or even a new hegemon. Rather, at a certain socio-historical juncture he represents a legal or a political critique that may not otherwise be mounted. But, this, again, at a cost, for his critique destines him to function as the law’s other, upon whom it has the right to throw the full force of its violence. What Lukács said about the self-containment of the work of art, which effects a pretence by remaking the world’s monstrous complexity over into a heightened unity, should be borne in mind when we reflect on the historical function and the cultural prestige of the outlaw. The totality of the real, in its full extensiveness, is beyond art, but art substitutes for this by producing an “intensive” totality; it selects and orders those elements that “are of decisive significance for the portion of life depicted…. In this sense [end page 222] the briefest song is as much an intensive totality as the mightiest epic” (Lukács 797). The Cash lyric isn’t an overflow from epic verse, with its steely heroes, or the nineteenth century realist novel, with its bourgeois and proletarian ranks. But it does, as Lukács suggests, condense and intensify a peculiar sort of psychological realism. It reminds us, fleetingly, of the psychological abysses portrayed in true confessions or case studies of the criminally insane, and it puts law and art at cross-purposes. It’s the singer who kills that man in Reno, but also his voice. It creates a brooding, tectonic space for each word, so that one by one and sound by sound, the words echo in an elemental register. This is what happens in the last half of the line, which to my mind is the reason that Cash carried the 1968 Grammy for top male vocal performance, twelve years after the song’s first release on Sam Phillips’ legendary Sun Records label. If it’s payback that caused Cash to pull the trigger, a cold joy at seeing the rival twitch to death, that’s not what the voice or the lyric conveys. The spontaneity of the act pulls against the dismal evenness of the tone. Cain kills Abel in a narrative that features nearly the same tonal equanimity. One would logically expect that the Cash baritone should be lighter than the basso profundo of the Biblical author. But it is not so. He sounds like a man who pulls a trigger and sees, in the same instant, the gallows waiting at the other end of his deed. We like hearing the line because it alienates us from our own unearned moral complacency. Crime, we recognize, is an extension of experimental consciousness and an assault on the redundancy of time. It seems, from a certain cultural distance, a complete dissolution of everything that constrains you. We like how flatly Cash conveys this and we sympathize with the lowly criminal, idiotic as this sympathy is since such crime could come looking for us too. What we might not properly appreciate, unless we’ve heard a good deal of these lines (which regularly punctuate blues and country of the early roots era), is how mentally disturbed the lyric is. Shooting someone in an avant-garde, snuff-film spirit, just to hear the death gurgle, is one thing. Perhaps it’s really a “free” act, but the line also expresses criminal amnesia, born, probably, of a miserable and monotonous prison routine. A clinician would say that the singer’s memory suffers from selective, retrograde impairment. Spatial confinement is the distinguishing feature of the prison experience, but the regimen of prison life also erodes temporal and social continuities with the world outside, and with one’s own memories. What the neurologists call psychogenic amnesia may set in. In his version of “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” the bluesman William (“Big Bill”) Broonzy sings of the convict’s purgatorial sense of abandonment when visiting time expires and the girlfriend leaves for New Orleans: [end page 223] Babe, I’m way down here, The “rollin’ fog” is a common weather episode in the Mississippi delta where Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary and the song’s setting, is located. Parchman had been a penal plantation since 1904, a 20,000-acre crop and livestock complex, worked, not by black slaves, but their outlaw descendents. In his book on Parchman, David Oshinsky takes a page from Hortense Powdermaker’s 1939 landmark study of Indianola blacks, After Freedom: A Cutural Study in the Deep South, and describes how “Jim Crow justice” bred an outlaw culture that sent twentieth century negroes back to their antebellum destiny: The Negro … lived largely outside the law. He played no role in making it, enforcing it, or judging those who broke it. The law did not protect him from white oppressors or black criminals. It did not treat him justly in the courtroom or sentence him consistently for his offense. As a result, the Negro saw little reason to respect the law or to look down upon those who were punished and sent to jail. (131-2) Parchman was (and still is) one of the most unusual facilities in the American criminal system. It was a sprawling, unfenced (on the outer perimeter) work colony whose long cotton and soybean fields were visited by fogs and seasonal floods. Its inmate population, almost wholly male and majority black, was segregated into residential work camps. “Trusty” gunmen guarded their fellow convicts and were rewarded – often with state pardons – for shooting down would-be escapees. At the top of the whole operation sat a professional farmer, housed in a Southern mansion. Policy allowed the prisoners conjugal privacy for their appointments with wives and girlfriends, but this couldn’t alleviate the changeless cycles of prison life. The fog in Broonzy’s lyric signals an enveloping psychological emptiness where time no longer opens onto a differentiated world, a meaningful social topography. In a grim, maximum-security fortress such as Folsom was in 1968, on the 90th anniversary of its founding, there were plenty of brutality, homosexual rape, and rackets of all sorts. But the inmates had also evolved a self-regulating culture. The population was split into ethnic gangs – the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Mexican Mafia, the San Antonio Family, etc. – that mediated their relations through political dealings and the exercise of violence. So while Parchman had [end page 224] long-standing policy of segregation between blacks and whites, Folsom was a breeding ground for racial subcultures that had formed spontaneously, as it were. According to Michael Streissguth, the gangs brought a strange sense of order to Folsom. In the absence of city blocks, train tracks, and other demarcations of turf, skin color chalked lines throughout the prison. And although the lines sometimes became battle lines, they sometimes preserved the piece. Gang justice cooled hot heads and subdued brewing violence throughout Folsom. Leaders worked with each other like diplomats of clashing super powers to avoid bloody riots could prove bizarre and tragic. A former Folsom guard recalls an incident when to settle up with the Aryan brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family preyed on its own man…. (20) Cash must have known it in 1956, when he composed the song, and even more so in ‘68, when he was greeted as the troubadour of Folsom fortress – that prisons incubate and expand criminal intelligence, while all sorts of vile abuses are perpetrated daily, with the guards and officers usually turning a blind eye. He had an image of autonomous social blocs and their turf wars. But he also knew that a deeper connectedness, the brotherhood of the lost and the damned, bound everyone together. Behind the outbursts of violence, and the sickening bareback humping of male-to-male sex, there was the hopeless drone of a drowned world. Cash was there to release the disfigured freedom that still boiled up through the seams. He remembers, as he writes in the autobiography, standing onstage, drug free for the first time in a long while, feeling something like a fellowship: “me and the convicts getting along just as fellow rebels, outsiders, and miscreants should” (201). His mission as a singer was not reform or penal critique, but the hard climb toward inner release. He was there to spur it on, but to get there one had to pass through darkness. “Folsom Prison Blues” taps into the “lifer’s” consciousness, trying to imagine the absolute discord, moral and causal, between one’s “free” crime and one’s immediate predicament. The shooting of the man in Reno has become motiveless because that’s the way it looks in hindsight. Time drags on, as the song says, and you find the disconnection between the crime and the punishment just gets longer and rarer until it’s like a rolling cloud you’re in. An analogy may be extracted from Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” published one year before “Folsom” was written. The escaped Misfit, whose life has been one long mutiny, as much against the social order as against the metaphysical system of southern, Bible-belt Christianity, orchestrates a family execution and muses openly: [end page 225] I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it…. I call myself the Misfit…. because I can’t make all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment. (27-8) If we want to trace another, more steady and direct ancestry for the Cash line, one of the stopping points has to be Jimmie Rodger’s “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas),” where the singer shoots up the ground under a cheatin’ woman: I’m gonna buy me a pistol, just as long as I’m tall, The misogyny is more than evident. It comes through in the phallic hyperbole of the five- or six-foot pistol (when Frankie shoots Johnny, however, her lady revolver only goes “rootie toot toot”). But Rodgers sings it amiably enough, and he provides a motive. Cash, however, has recrafted the last line and chopped away the background. There’s no anecdote, no woman, not even a bar fight, and though we might be expected to supply these, nothing in the song lets us. And suddenly it’s become more than a home-grown homicide. The line reaches the outer limits of criminality and teeters over the abyss of outlaw consciousness. The criminal prosecutor would handle this with a head-on argument, but that’s not what makes it an outlaw line. The Crown could go right to the mens rea, the mental intent to commit an unlawful act. It’s right there in the lyric. Outside of the actus reus, the actual commission of the crime itself, intentionality is paramount legal requirement. Cash, however, pleads his rights as an artist. He has stripped the Rodgers’ scenario of its motive and left only the intent. This makes the criminal psychology truly aberrant, for the intent seems driven by a curiosity that can only be called aesthetic. We seem to be overhearing, in cold mental retrospect, the deliberations of a homicidal sadist. But our frisson needs to be rather more conceptual than clinical in import. The line isn’t mental snapshot of a soulless moment, but a rather singular experiment. It implies that the implacable inner quality that drives the outlaw is his willingness, or perhaps his compulsion, to shock the prevailing order into a confrontation with the spectre of its originary violence, and the immanent, legal violence that holds it together from within, like a cement cage. If some of us in the audience find ourselves urging the outlaw on, then we should be prepared to expect that this violence, like all violence, exudes [end page 226] a horrible discovery: every moment in time is potentially alive with extinctions, new terminations that are as heartless as the fate of a blind newly-born animal in a large litter, losing the competition for the mother’s nourishment. In the animal’s case, with its groping maw-sighted battle for the teat yielding less success with every attempt, there is weakening, a floundering struggle that gets more hopeless with every exertion (those who, like me, have seen this happen, know what it looks like), and finally ends in death through starvation. A small pile of dead rag, softly furred and sightless right to the last. Whether protracted or sudden, violence is always peremptory. The outlaw adds to this a particularly human privilege. He exercises the right of all humans, were they pregnant mothers, assassins of abortion doctors, suicide bombers, pilots launching their payloads with impunity, adolescent gangsters in Brazil, etc. – namely, the right to kill for a reason, no matter how obscure, particular, socially justified, or demented that reason may be. The counterpart to this is the right to steal something for the pure purpose of having it. In other words, the outlaw exercises the untenable human right to assert his liberty through crime and the pre-emptive renunciation of all orders but his own. He is essentially, in one dimension of his being, a motiveless force. He is therefore as free as any god or devil, but also as pathetic (in the Greek of this term) as any human being, hence the great fascination that he exerts. The representation of this pathos is the central measure of the outlaw’s cultural recurrence, that is, his recurrence in narrative art (prose stories, verse ballads, and films) as a legendary persona with a distinct phenomenological profile. This right that he exercises – to kill or steal for a sovereign and unspeakable reason – in the name of all men and women, including those that he might slay or plunder, brings the outlaw to an impasse, one that isn’t ultimately moral or social or legal, but temporal. He puts time back into a vertical free-fall, which is his tragedy. For us on the safe side of the law, he may be a criminal worthy of a brutal capture and punishment to the point of death, but his pathos is intriguing because of the time structure that besets his actions and begins to overwhelm him from beyond the horizons of his consciousness. He may not be able to free the time or lift the law from our shoulders. That much we understand. Most outlaws are stamped with an expiry date, at which point they enter popular legend and the cultural archive, or sink back into the annals of criminality where their violence fails to signify. But when they come on time, that is, just in time, or ahead of it, then we are suddenly free to unleash our scepticism. If the outlaw ignites an unsuspected level of social disbelief toward the legal order, and, beyond that, the moral coherence of the world at a given historical juncture, then he has done his “job” culturally, and perhaps politically. [end page 227]
References Broonzy, William (“Big Bill”), “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” The Blues. Traditional Black Music. Ed. Jerry Silverman. New York: Chelsea House, 1994 Cash, Johnny, Cash. The autobiography. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997 Hobsbawm, Eric, Bandits. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969. Revised edition, 2000 Lefebvre, Henri, Introduction to Modernity (1962). Trans. John Moore. London: Verso, 1995 Lukács, Georg, “Art and Objective Truth.” Critical Theory Since 1965. Eds. Hazard Adams & Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: U of Florida P, 1986 Marcus, Greil, Mystery Train. Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll music. Fourth revised edition. New York: Plume, 1997 O’Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955 Oshinsky, David. “Worse Than Slavery.” Parchman farm and the ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: The Free Press, 1996 Rodgers, Jimmie, “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas).” Rec. Nov. 30, 1927. The Essential Jimmie Rodgers. RCA 07863-67500-2, 1997 Streissguth, Michael, “Playing to the Forgotten.” Arthur. Issue Twelve (September 2004): 12-25. Excerpted from Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. The making of a masterpiece. New York: Da Capo, 2004
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