Horizon

Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part II

Part I

(Hat tip to Joan's Place).

It’s a conundrum for the interested historian. Bonfire provides an almost unique surviving example of this spontaneous parochial custom, an authentic folkloric work with genuinely entrenched roots in an otherwise bleak vista of recently installed ‘Heritage’ photo-opportunities and the other plastic eyesores of Merrie Olde Tourist England. It’s also a bastion of raging Political Incorrectness that sits uncomfortably within Tony Blair’s modernized, progressive, enlightened Cool Britannia. The image of costumed mobs parading fiery crosses through the night seems more reminiscent of Jim Crow Mississippi than the Home Counties, and indeed the arguments concerning Bonfire run in transatlantic parallel to the feud over the quasi-official status of Confederate insignia in the American South. Like their Dixie cousins, are the people of Lewes merely memorializing a collective folk tradition of common regional mores, or are they tacitly celebrating the triumph of intolerance and discrimination in a way that has disturbing contemporary resonance for such places as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Ulster? Does message trump medium in such a situation, no matter how furiously the actors distance themselves from the less palatable elements of their history?

Perhaps a way to reconcile the rich cultural investment in Bonfire with its anachronistic or inappropriate trappings is to consider how best to interpret the meaning of the ritual for its participants and its community. It is possible, and indeed there is good evidence to support this, to see Lewes as a particularly successful product of a 17th Century Establishment project to manufacture a united, dependable, and pliable national society through the deliberate scapegoating of a given minority – a product that continues to operate and offend despite its creators having long lost interest in it. However, it is equally viable to view Lewes as a winter festival of misrule in the medieval tradition, an opportunity for the local plebeians to cock a snoot at overarching authority made all the more subversive because the forms of commemoration are ostensibly cloaked with formal notions of loyalty and patriotism. In this sense, the present-day struggles between the town council and the organizers to impose and avoid increasing regulation of Bonfire are just the latest episode in an integral story of legality and resistance played out in a theatrical public forum. It could be that the two opposing interpretations of Lewes, jingoistic artifice imposed from above and popular rebellion emerging from the grass roots, co-exist and collide, their ideological friction providing the literal spark that gives Bonfire its emotional intensity and luminescence.

To Be Continued

Posted by Alan Allport at November 3, 2005 02:28 AM