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Prison and the Modern Imagination
| Article
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19998 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
5,179 Words |
| Author
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Victor Brombert
Victor Brombert is professor of comparative literature and
director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton
University. His most recent book is The Hidden Reader. |
One does not normally think of jail as a poetic setting, but rather as a place of punishment and repression. As a symbol, it points to constriction and victimhood. In a series of studies dealing with oppressive social institutions, the French philosopher Michel Foucault came to view the massive prison walls as a metaphor of society's techniques of power and control. Prisons not only confine the "culprit" or victimize the innocent, they impose in one way or another the power of society--a power of tyrannical potential.
To speak of the poetic dimension of the prison image may thus appear incongruous , even shocking. Prison conditions, prison revolts, prison repression--to the extent that the general public is aware of them--are grim subjects. And even in literary terms, it may seem inappropriate or impertinent to discuss authors like Stendhal, Dickens, and Dostoevsky in terms of a poetic experience of the prison reality and the prison metaphor. After all, Sendhal was one of the first writers, in the wake of upheavals brought about by the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic regimes, to denounce the threats of the modern police state. Fabrice del Dongo, Stendhal's young hero in The Charterhouse of Parma, fears nothing more than prison and is made keenly aware of the repressive policies of the Metternich regime. Dickens as a boy came to know the gloom of prison walls firsthand, when his family joined his father in jail for debt in the Marshalsea prison--and the future novelist was marked for life by this humiliating experience. As for Dostoevsky, he experienced the prisoner's chains in his own flesh, serving time for political reasons in a Siberian penal colony and living for four years in brutal promiscuity with common criminals convicted of murder and other violent crimes.
And yet the image of incarceration is essentially ambivalent in the Western tradition. An object of fear, the prison is also a subject of poetic reverie. At times, the prison space almost seems to encourage poetic meditation, and spiritual fervor. Do not the prisoner's cell and the monastic cell look strangely alike? Throughout the Western tradition, prison has indeed also been seen as a place of private salvation. The salvational prison theme belongs to a venerable tradition comprising gnostic, Platonic, Neoplatonic, and patristic writings. Consciously or unconsciously, the place of incarceration has thus also frequently been conceived of as a place of redemption, regenerative privacy, purity, and even freedom. How else is one to understand King Lear's apparently "mad" speech to Cordelia toward the end of Shakespeare's great tragedy? All has been lost, all is defeat. Yet Cordelia--also a captive--has been found again. Gain is secured amid loss. It
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