The Guy Fawkes Mask (Remember, Remember)

You know this image, taken up as it has been by Occupy and Anonymous. We have since seen it during the Arab Spring, in Tunisia, in Tahrir Square in Egypt, and in Bahrain 2013. In May of that year, the government of Saudi Arabia banned the importation of the masks, saying that it would confiscate any found on sale. Still they proliferate, such as in the 2014 and 2019 Hong Kong Protests and in other movements of this kind, aspiring to a more democratic world, that imperfect legacy of Ancient Greece, with demos meaning "the people". 

I wonder about this, given the history of whom it represents, the heavy past burden the mask carries. More on which as we come to it, slowly returning backwards in time, though this has faded, until such time as Alan Moore and David Lloyd conjured it forth from near oblivion again into the daylight. The mask might even be, as Pierre Nora wrote in his theory of history and memory, put together in the 70s and published in the 80s and 90s, a “site of memory.” 

"We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left. Our interest in lieux de memoire, where memory crystallizes and secretes itself, has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn -but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory"

A site could be a place, yes, but also, and this is our case, some symbolic object vested with some sense of what has gone before and is leaving us, has left us, at the interstice of being forgotten. Or, as Nora says, such sites are "embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it.” The memory site has been compared to a seashell returned to the sea shore when the tide is gone out, no longer quite life, not yet death, yet we can listen to them and know something of the ocean. 

Nora famously thought this notion could not be transferred outside of France, but that has been much debated in the thirty or forty years since his opus was published. And it seems to me that, across the channel, across the Atlantic, and then into the wider world, that the Guy Fawkes mask is situated in this interstice, this threshold of remembering and forgetting, which is interesting as the mask has a long history with a rhyme to it that begins “Remember Remember...”

The short term origins, as you may already know, lie in the graphic novel written by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, two politically engaged anarchists, at the same time as Nora was putting together and first publishing his theories of historical memory. This comic then served as inspiration for the 2005 movie of V for Vendetta in which this figure of V is a masked avenger who saves the world-a world which has left democracy and slipped into a fascistic dystopia of concentration camps and Christian Terror. V may save this world but remains all the while morally ambiguous, damaged as he was by the very horror of the world that produced him.

"We knew that V was going to be an escapee from a concentration camp where he had been subjected to medical experiments but then I had the idea that in his craziness he would decide to adopt the persona and mission of Guy Fawkes – our great historical revolutionary."

And now we come to the original Guy Fawkes, who as also been called “the last man to enter parliament with honest intentions.”

London, 1605.

Catholics under Protestant rule in England had been persecuted for nearly 80 yrs. Dying tortured or at the stake had morphed moreso into a heavy social oppression, unless you had big ideas, which a handful of Catholic co-conspirators did. 

They plotted and they plotted, until one among them asked “Shall we always, gentlemen, talk and never do anything?” At the last moment a letter denouncing those plans arrived in the right (or wrong) hands

5 November,1605, authorities found 36 barrels of gunpowder under Parliament with the intent to blow up the House of Lords (and to this day the English monarch's bodyguards still search the cellars below the Palace of Westminster before each state opening of Parliament – remember, remember....)

There was a man with those barrels, who, when asked his name, replied “John Johnson.”

Days on the rack did this to his writing hand:

  

...by which point authorities knew they were dealing with Guy, or as he liked to style himself, Guido Fawkes (the Italianization of his name, he thought, burnished his Catholic credentials).

As a traitor to the crown, he was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in London.

He refused, though their prisoner, to die by their hands. On January’s last day, 1606, Fawkes was called to meet his gruesome fate. While climbing the scaffold, however, he jumped. With his neck instantly broken, death was immediate, instead of coming only after a long and grisly, inhuman suffering, worse even than what he had known in the Tower.

So what we have is a reactionary, by definition an arch-conservative, and moreover a reactionary who failed. It seems an odd choice for anti-hero freedom fighter of ldemocratic iberation movements.

How did such a transformation come about?

That very month of January, when Fawkes completed suicide, there was enacted a law in England commemorating the fifth of November to what eventually became Bonfire Night, so that it might never be forgotten. As such the day was devoted, in principle, to thanking God for His providential saving of Crown. The message is clear of course that Protestant worship is therefore the favored flavor of worship of the Christian Deity.

And the schoolchildren would chant:

Remember Remember 5th of November
Gunpowder treason and plot
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot

as they would beg "a penny for the guy," the "guy" an effigy, to throw up a bonfire to burn. Hence our term for any old fellow, a "guy."

They would wear masks in his likeness – but not in admiration, much as you’d be a monster for Halloween

This should be familiar to those familiar with V for Vendetta, as Bonfire Night is the setting of opening scene.

Meanwhile as this becomes custom in England, in Ireland, outside of Protestant enclaves, never takes to it. This is not surprising for a predominantly Catholic country which never took kindly, and with what reason, to English colonization.

 

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Irish politicians of Independent bent were given a sinister Fawkesian look.

In 1867, for Punch Magazine, John Tenniel (of Alice in Wonderland fame) created the Fenian Guy Fawkes.

The cartoon had a long afterlife, republished as it was with the 1974 IRA bombings of Westminster and 
elsewhere in England.

1974. By this point V is either coming into or gelling in Alan Moore’s mind. 24 year old David Lloyd may even have seen it. And at this time across the channel, Pierre Nora is conceiving of "sites of memory."

Were I to write an article on this, the missing link I'd seek would be the Irish point of view. Did Fawkes ever become a kind of crypto-hero, an underground figure to the Catholic Indenpendentist cause, trying to overthrow the English government for a pro-Catholic rule? 

The question is particulary apt throughout this period of 70s and into 80s that were known as “The Troubles” in Ireland, during which the Irish Republican Army did everything up to and including terrorist acts to free their homeland from English rule, as concentrated in Protestant North of the country

A few other remarks about this period of the 70s 80s. Traditional Bonfire Night with its masks and mischief, six calender days apart, was being increasingly subsumed into an American style Halloween celebration. “Remember, Remember” indeed when this is precisely the kind of cultural forgetting that Nora was talking about. Yet in Ireland the holiday was still being used by a minority Protestant ruling class as proof of Catholic treachery.

At this juncture in history, the English government was run by the Iron Lady, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, also known as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher for pinching pennies by eliminating the free milk program for students over the age of seven. This was perhaps the least of the acts that made many say of her that she was the most hated woman in the country. No friend to Ireland's independence, in 1984 the Irish Republican Army tried to assasinate her, unsuccessfully. Margaret Thatcher died in 2013 and when she did, the 1939 song “Ding Dong the witch is Dead” topped the song charts at n° 2.

But it was under her governmentt that Alan Moore conceived, wrote, and in 1982 published V for Vendetta, predicting the world as fascist horror show in ten years time, a world that Thatcherism was inevitably hurtling towards.

David Lloyd at this period tossed off a note to Alan Moore with an idea about how they should imagine V. "Why don't we portray him as a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those papier-mâché masks, in a cape and a conical hat? He'd look really bizarre and it would give Guy Fawkes the image he's deserved all these years. We shouldn't burn the chap every Nov. 5th but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!" With hindsight, Alan Moore says of this idea: "All of the various fragments in my head suddenly fell into place, united behind the single image of a Guy Fawkes mask."

They could not, however, find one of the old fashioned masks, for it was summer certainly, but at this point too, as we recall, Bonfire Night was being subsumed into Halloween, forgotten. Or as Alan Moore put it:  "How interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography. It seems you couldn't keep a good symbol down." This seems to be something of what Pierre Nora was indicating in the interstices between remembering and oblivion. 

Yet Moore says “If the mask stands for anything, in the current context, that [vox populi] is what it stands for. This is the people. That mysterious entity that is evoked so often – this is the people.”

The populi, just people, persons, "a guy," if you will. One of the demos

V, to the author, is also “Vox,” that is, the Latin for voice, written in the very features of V, his smile and his mustache, grotesque and exaggerated. The V also stands for Victim, Vengeance, Villain, Vanishing, and more. It even hearkens, he says, to Vaudeville, that stage of old. Which brings us back to masks and the voices that bring them to life.

In antiquity, “person,” the Greek prosopon and the Latin persona, referred to the mask worn over the face by an actor on stage. For when the demos first started gathering to watch stories playing out before us, in the Greek theatre, actors wore these lines face pieces with an emotion written clearly into the features, so that someone seated in the very back row could still understand what the actor was attempting to convey, be it in the context of tragedy or comedy. The features were often exaggerated, grotesque features.

But perhaps the most significant role of the mask was that of transformation: an ordinary member of the demos, any guy,  could go beyond his real identity and become a mythological hero. This is perhaps not so very far removed from the present fate of the Guy mask, who morphed from arch-vilain on one hand to “just a guy” on the other, the voice of the people, speaking out truth to power with the magic of the mask. It is not, or not only, so much a way to obscure identity, as a way to transform an "ordinary guy" to become a hero, by way of the anti-hero we know from graphic novels and film. The demos through this mask seems to have found a voice.

Make no mistake, though when we go to movies, the intimacy of cinema, our even our home television or computer, there is no longer the need that a Greek actor had for the mask at its origins. Still when we do watch a story played out by actors, we are the descendants of that demos, watching stories of, among other things, the fall of tyrants, of tragically flawed heros. And it has been argued that without the Greek theatre, no Greek democracy.

Looking at the comedy mask, looking at the Fawkes mask, we might recognize, for millenia gone now, another kind of "persona," from the deep past of Western democracy, Greek again, and loci of those gone on to Hades, the kouros, graveside statue of one who had died and yet survived, bearing a smile in the face of death.

Remember, Remember.

For further reading :

Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” (transl. Marc Roudebush) Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989), pp. 7-24.
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928520

Tom Lamont, “Alan Moore: Meet the Man Behind the Protest Mask,” The Guardian, 26, Nov 2011.

James McConnel, “Remembering the 1605 Gunpowder Plot in Ireland, 1605—1920” Journal of British Studies,V ol. 50, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2011), pp. 863-891.
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23265539

R. Halpern, "Theater and Democratic Thought: Arendt to Rancière," Critical Inquiry, 37(3), 2011, 545–572.  

doi:10.1086/659358