I have just reread Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit, which has led me to the subject of the prison in life and literature. Should I fear writing on such a downbeat topic? But I have given up trying to predict my readers’ preferences. I wrote on doomsday and got my best stats in a good while. I have finally given up and admitted that after five years at this I have no idea what my readers will be drawn to and what might bore them. I can only follow the light of my own intuition as it flickers in the dark, hoping it will not turn out to be a will o’ the wisp that leads me into the bog. And yet I do know this: that the image of the prison grips our collective imagination. We may be horrified, we may be angry, but we are fascinated by the image of the prison, judging by the number of famous novels, popular songs, and iconic movies in which it appears.
Let me make my case by inundating readers with titles of works in which the prison appears, in no particular order. Among narratives The Consolation of Philosophy, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The House of the Dead, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, Papillon, The Stars My Destination. Among films Grand Illusion, King Rat, The Birdman of Alcatraz, The Bridge over the River Kwai, Riot in Cell Block 11, Escape from Alcatraz, The Great Escape, Stalag 17, Cool Hand Luke, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Hurricane, Midnight Express, In the Name of the Father. Among songs “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Fought the Law,” “Midnight Special,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “In the Jailhouse Now,” “Hurricane,” “Band on the Run,” “Parchman Farm,” “I Shall Be Released.” I rest my case. This is a more or less random skimming off the top: there are dozens of additional candidates in all three categories, and I’m sure readers can come up with more examples of their own. What counts as a prison is flexible. It can be a single building, but also a whole camp or gulag. It can sometimes be a mental institution, as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Marat/Sade, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Shutter Island, or, for that matter, in Batman comics as Arkham Asylum. Certain prisons have acquired a kind of archetypal status: the Tower of London, the Château d’If, Alcatraz, Sing Sing, Devil’s Island, Folsom, Riker’s Island, San Quentin.
The point is that something about the image of the prison haunts us, and that is my way of exploring the imagination. If it haunts us, it has roots deep down in the subterranean region of our minds. You can call such images “archetypes,” or you can find such a term pretentious. All it means is that some things won’t go away, even unpleasant or nightmarish things. After all, on one level the prison can be a metaphor for the unconscious itself, in which all sorts of images are held prisoner, yet which sometimes escape, for better or worse. I do not intend to psychologize away the prison as part of a system of power that works either for justice or oppression, depending on one’s ideological point of view. But social institutions and systems of power are partly held in place by the numinous energy of images out of the imagination. To dismiss this as “mystification” is to me itself a mystification. Blake was right: there are real manacles, but they are manifestations of the “mind forg’d manacles” he spoke of in his poem “London,” and if we are to overthrow systems of oppression, or alter them into something humane, we cannot afford to ignore that there is a deeper power that keeps social and political power in place—or overturns it.
Roughly a third of Dickens’ 15 novels have prisons in them. His first novel, Pickwick Papers, is really more an episodic sequence of sketches played mostly for farce. Yet, late in the game, Mr. Pickwick is imprisoned for debt in the Fleet prison, and the tone becomes more serious. The Gordon Riots of 1780, which included the storming of Newgate prison, are part of Nicholas Nickleby. In David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber is sent to the King’s Bench prison for debt, and is joined by his whole family. Dr. Manette is imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities. But it is Dickens’ darkest novel, Little Dorrit, that explores the theme of the prison most extensively. Mr. Dorrit is imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison, and although the debt was small-time, England’s intractable bureaucracy ensures that the case can never be resolved, and Mr. Dorrit resides in the Marshalsea for 25 years along with his family. This part of Little Dorrit is a psychological study. Through a plot twist, Mr. Dorrit suddenly becomes rich and leaves the prison. However, Dickens shows how you can take the man out of prison, but you can’t take the prison out of the man. The experience of prison becomes internalized. Mr. Dorrit is desperate to hide his prison experience both from the high society he now moves in and from himself, so he throws himself into an ostentatious lifestyle. But at a crucial moment, in front of the rich and respectable people he is trying to impress, his mind snaps, and suddenly he is back in the prison again. When the crowd realizes this, it will ostracize him, and it is a kind of mercy that he dies soon after.
Dickens is obsessed with prisons for deeply personal reasons. His father was imprisoned for debt in the same prison as Mr. Dorrit, the Marshalsea. As with Mr. Dorrit, the rest of the family moved in with him except for young Charles, who was put to work in a blacking factory, a trauma dramatized by David Copperfield, whose initials are those of his creator reversed. Mr. Dorrit cannot face the verdict that a prison sentence has imposed upon him. The letter of the law makes him guilty of debt, but the dark spirit of the law imposes upon him a new identity as a humiliated failure. He tries to beat the rap, so to speak, by playing the role of the exact opposite, of a vain, peacock-strutting member of the upper crust. But it catches up with him. Dickens hid the details of his family history, but he tried to confront the psychological damage through his art, most profoundly in Little Dorrit, whose theme is that prison is a state of mind. So is freedom, which is prison’s opposite, as famous lines by the poet Richard Lovelace proclaimed in 1642:
Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage: Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.
King Lear also strikes a pose of triumphant defiance against external circumstance as he and Cordelia are taken away to prison:
Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too- Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out- And take upon ‘s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out, In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by th’ moon. (5.3)
But in fact prison is most often internalized, moving from external fact to inward state. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the angel Michael tells Eve that she will retain a “paradise within thee” that is “happier far” then the external Eden she is losing. In the same way, hell is also a state of being. Milton’s Satan has escaped from the ultimate prison of hell, but in private admits that “Myself am hell.”
What is prison considered as what Blake called a State? It is the demonic negation of what Northrop Frye called the primary concern of freedom. Thus, one of its aspects is that of paralysis, of being trapped and incapable of moving. In nightmares, we are chased, threatened, yet we cannot move, or we move slowly, as if through glue. We are the deer in the headlights, the rat frozen by the eye of the snake, the person with stage fright frozen by the judgmental eyes of the audience. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan spoke of the paralyzing power of the Gaze. Milton’s Samson in Samson Agonistes would have understood Mr. Dorrit’s experience all too well. The worst torment to him is not slave labor but the mocking gaze of his enemies, who can see him in his humiliation while he cannot see them. The Gaze is the terror of surveillance, a power used by police states as a device of imprisonment more effective than prison bars, made famous in the phrase from George Orwell’s 1984, “Big Brother is watching.” In his influential book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault made famous Jeremy Bentham’s invention of the 19th century, the Panopticon, a form of prison architecture whereby the guards could spy upon the prisoners at all times. In our time, surveillance has become digital. We are tracked by our personal information recorded in databases. The Trump administration has become obsessed with trying to create a universal database of all citizens as a method of control. But capitalism is also trying to control us through surveillance. Each new model of car I lease has more devices that monitor me and try to control me through various warnings. In the previous model, these could be turned off, but not in the newest version. I have read that systems are being contemplated that will monitor whether a driver is drunk, based on various physical symptoms, and refuse to start the vehicle. A prisoner on parole wearing an electronic shackle is controlled in the same way.
In short, the political and economic system of our time is moving in the direction of making society as a whole into a kind of unwalled prison, a place in which people are spied upon and controlled at all times. Recently, some of the people behind this move have come out into the open and are saying they don’t believe in democracy. What they believe in is control. It is a story far older than the political scene at the moment. The political, economic, and religious tyrant of Blake’s mythology is Urizen, but, as an authoritarian, Urizen is not a blustering bully like Trump. He is a maker of laws to control every aspect of life, and he is outraged when life does not abide by his laws. Moral goodness to him is willingness to be obedient, to be controlled.
Dickens understands that people who have had no literal experience of incarceration still create mental prisons for themselves in the form of various kinds of obsession that lock them into certain patterns of behavior. As Northrop Frye has shown, Dickens descends from the tradition of the “comedy of humors,” a humor being a certain type of obsessive behavior in which characters are imprisoned. A common type of humor is that of the miser, obsessed with money. Humors are, in a way, a secularized version of sins: some venial and harmless and often funny, the humor of humors, so to speak; some mortal, the worst being pride. Mrs. Clennam, the mother of Little Dorrit’s male protagonist Arthur Clennam, has lived for years sequestered in the top floor of a ramshackle house, confined to a wheelchair, doing nothing but brood upon her misfortunes, which she construes in terms of her Calvinistic religion as being predestined. But at a crisis of the action, she leaps out of her chair, to the astonishment of everyone, and we realize that her paralysis has been of her own making. Another character, Miss Wade, is a grievance collector who, like many obsessives, knows what she is: she has written a confession called “Diary of a Self-Tormentor.” Dostoyevsky, who admired Dickens, created the greatest figure of this type, the Underground Man. Such figures turn inward upon themselves and gnaw their own vitals. Yet, paradoxically, self-accusation can be a form of superiority complex. There is some of this in Hamlet, who says, “Denmark’s a prison,” yet who loses no opportunity for another soliloquy blaming himself for not acting—for being imprisoned, emotionally paralyzed.
Such obsessiveness creates an isolated consciousness of which solitary confinement is an objective correlative. By this point, it is becoming clear that prison is what Frye would call a displaced version of hell. The hell of Dante’s Inferno is an ultimate prison. On its upper levels, sinners endure punishments that symbolize the nature of their sin: schismatics, who split the Church, are punished by being eviscerated by an angel with a sword. The rule here is not Christian love but the Old Testament’s “eye for an eye.” The judge of this legal system, Minos, who in real life had commanded the artificer Daedalus to construct the prison of the Cretan labyrinth, sits at the gates and sentences arriving dead souls. However many times he wraps his tail around him signifies the circle to which the damned soul is consigned. But sometimes sinners are shown locked into their obsessions in a way that renders the external confinement superfluous. Depending on how you interpret the 5th canto, Paolo and Francesca may still adhere to the adulterous love that damned them. Further down, Count Ugolino gnaws revengefully for all eternity upon the skull of Cardinal Ruggieri, who starved him and his family to death.
But furthest down of all, the worst sinners of the 9th circle are entirely frozen in ice, unable to move, conscious but utterly immobile, trapped in an ultimate form of solitary confinement. If you are feeling vengeful, it might give some satisfaction to contemplate the punishment of these worst of sinners, the betrayers. We are so often frustrated by those who not only escape external punishment but who keep themselves out of mental prison by a power of denial, lying to themselves. The ultimate punishment of such people would be to have to contemplate for all eternity exactly who they really are and what they have really done. But of course it would be, like all revenge, ultimately futile: they would still lie to themselves, consider themselves persecuted, each one acting the false role of a Prometheus of ice rather than fire. For ice signifies what such people really are. Dante is strikingly original in making ice rather than fire the ultimate signifier of damnation, but there is a profound insight latent in his symbolism. Fire is passion and desire and energy, and therefore it is good gone wrong. The real nature of evil is to be cold as ice. It is not accidental that the most horrifying prisons in America right now are detention centers set up by an agency called ICE, illegal prisons deliberately set up to hold innocent people whom the state regards as undesirable, mostly because they are not white, the color of ice. Ahab in Moby Dick was not wrong in associating whiteness with the cold, malicious, Urizenic evil that lurks behind the facade of this world. In contrast, Ahab associates himself with fire, and sees himself as a Yankee Prometheus. Ishmael has more sympathy with him than Ishmael lets on.
Yet, as happens so often with the imagination, we discover that we are faced with opposites that cannot be logically reconciled. Just as we have arrived at the conclusion that the real form of prison is mental, a kind of self-afflicting consciousness, we come up against an opposite conclusion: that prison is a matter of the body, of reduction to the body. The first chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is titled “The Body of the Condemned,” and its thesis is stated in the following passage:
But we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain “political economy” of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use “lenient” methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue—the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission. (25)
At the end of the chapter, Foucault sums up what he says he has discovered:
In recent years, prison revolts have occurred throughout the world. There was certainly something paradoxical about their aims, their slogans and the way they took place. They were revolts against an entire state of physical misery that is over a century old: against cold, suffocation and overcrowding, against decrepit walls, hunger, physical maltreatment. But they were also revolts against model prisons, tranquillizers, isolation, the medical or educational services....What was at issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power; it is this whole technology of power over the body that the technology of the “soul”—that of the educationalists, psychologists and psychiatrists—fails either to conceal or to compensate, for the simple reason that it is one of its tools. (30)
We cannot evaluate Foucault’s assertion without confronting the question of whether any penal institution of any type can possibly be benign, performing the service of ensuring public safety by incarcerating predators and acting as a deterrent to the kind of dishonesty that disrupts public order by breaking any law that it can get away with breaking without being punished. Foucault has at least the reputation of regarding all systems of any sort as malignant in tendency. Power corrupts, and systems—not just penal systems but all systems—are corrupt to the extent that they are powerful. Systems are worse than individual villains not only because they have more resources but because responsibility is dispersed. You can’t fight City Hall. Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle showed that every bureaucracy does its best to avoid accountability by working through anonymous functionaries, none of whom have the power or motivation to address any problem. Kafka was influenced by Dickens, who bitterly attacks government bureaucracy in the form of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, which has mastered the art of “how not to do it,” “it” being anything and everything. In Bleak House, he depicts the legal system as a tentacular labyrinth into which law cases disappear and never emerge. There will never be a judgment until the Last Judgment.
But in the attack on prisons in Little Dorrit, Dickens is faced with a particular problem. Imprisoning people like Mr. Dorrit for debt could be abolished, and in fact was, not too many years after the novel was published. But if the whole penal system were to be abolished as a sinister power system, what would happen to law enforcement? There are many selfish people who game the system even with law enforcement. No enforcement basically means no laws: we are returned to the lawless individualism of the Wild West. Some people think they would like this. Of these, some are naive, some are trying to look cool, and some are dangerous. Dickens wrestles with the problem by opening Little Dorrit with a scene in a prison in Marseilles from which a criminal named Rigaud is escaping from custody. Dickens is unfortunately not very effective at portraying someone completely evil, and Rigaud is the mustache-twirling villain from stage melodrama, so unbelievable that Dickens has to keep telling us how scary he is. But such frightening people exist. If you doubt that, look at Iago, Goneril, and Regan in Shakespeare. Respectable people do not usually encounter such figures, who live beyond the law-abiding boundaries. But they exist, and they are frightening. Worse, they have their own anti-system of power, embodied in organizations like the Mafia.
Making an argument for the necessity of law enforcement is terribly difficult in the face of present reality, which is that the American penal system is unbelievably corrupt and vicious. Guards and wardens are sadistic, living conditions inhuman, and prisons are a way for unprincipled businesspeople to make money. Not to mention that fact that our society forces at least a large number of people into crime by subjecting them to poverty and social injustice, which makes them desperate and sometimes antisocial. Then we self-righteously punish them by throwing them into hellholes, and pride ourselves that we value “law and order.” People howl over “defund the police” without recognizing that the police need to be reformed as much as the penal system. Yes, some of them risk their lives to keep us safe. But also, yes, a fair number of them are racist, corrupt, and on the take. Defund the police, if regarded sensibly, would not mean abolish the police.
If society were not a game rigged against a lot of people at the bottom, there would be fewer people to imprison. Here, America has no ground to stand on. We imprison a far greater percentage of people than any European country, and subject them to conditions that we used to abhor in other countries. We could, and should, abolish the present penal system and rebuild it from the ground up on the model of Scandinavian democracies that stress humane conditions and rehabilitation over punishment. But that would necessitate also abolishing the whole Social Darwinist setup of American society. I can understand why someone like Foucault thinks it will never happen, and condemns all power systems whatsoever. The fact is, his observations give an accurate enough picture of most prisons and penal systems as they have existed and still exist.
Which returns us to Foucault’s insistence on the preoccupation of penal systems on the body. The apparent contradiction between this and the prison as a state of mind has a secret logic to it, which we must try to trace. The penal system accepts the fact that the mind is the locus of the primary concern of freedom. The body, on the other hand, is our prison. It is vulnerable to pain and sickness. The various punishments that are part of the prison experience are all intended to break the mind’s resistance and reduce us to the body. When you are in serious pain, you are nothing but an agonized body. Nothing exists but the body and the body’s pain. It is the only reality. Resistance to pain and the ability to suffer are respected in many contexts, not merely as proof of manliness but as proof of the mastery of the mind or spirit over the body. Prison—not the ideal, theoretical humane prison but prison as it has been mostly known in history and today—seeks, consciously or unconsciously, to break the spirit of the prisoner. Wardens and guards have often gravitated to their jobs because they are sadists who get a thrill out of breaking people down to the level of groveling, though pain and humiliation, which often includes the sadistic mastery of rape. Some of the classic prison stories, such as Cool Hand Luke, become contests between a sadistic warden and a rebel prisoner who will not give in. Sometimes the torturers even become fascinated with a prisoner who will not break, and keep increasing the tortures as a kind of perverse experiment to find out the secret of such a power that can resist power, as do the Iroquois who torture the Jesuit missionary to death in the narrative poem Brébeuf and His Brethren by the Canadian poet E. J. Pratt. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,” says Gloucester in King Lear. “They use us for their sport.” And of course there were the Nazi “experiments” on Jews in the death camps. Most people break, of course. George Orwell, a pessimist like Foucault, felt that everyone has a breaking point. The narrator of 1984 has a phobia of rats. When the torturers threaten to put a cage of rats over his head, he is guilty of the sin of the 9th circle, of betrayal. “Do it to Julia,” he says, speaking of his lover. It is that moment that proves, in Orwell’s view, that the tyrant’s boot will stamp on the human face forever.
Yet some do not break. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison and did not break. It is well known that he took comfort there from “Invictus,” by the Victorian poet William Earnest Henley. It is not a great poem artistically, but it expresses a sentiment that has made it famous. Many people know its most famous lines:
I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
The poem ends defiantly:
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
Henley’s poem was inspired not by prison but by health issues, but the body is our prison and our sadistic warden. The older we get, the more true this becomes.
Thus, the punishment inflicted by prison systems is ostensibly to satisfy our need for justice. But although its purpose is to counteract malicious power, prison and its punishments are themselves a form of power, and those who take it upon themselves to punish, even given legal sanction, are subject to what Jung called inflation and become sadistic themselves. This danger is the subject of many of Clint Eastwood’s later movies, especially Unforgiven. Inflation balloons into a form of megalomania whose motto is “Ye shall be as gods.” The tendency of the power drive is not just towards total outward obedience. It wants also to break the minds of those subject to it. Hence torture leads towards brainwashing. When the subject is physically broken through various tortures, especially of the kind that affect the mind such as sleep deprivation, the mind itself can be enslaved. During the years of Cold War paranoia, the public became fascinated by the subject of brainwashing, resulting in films such as The Manchurian Candidate in 1962, in which an American POW during the Korean War is brainwashed into becoming an assassin who attempts to kill a presidential candidate. Those of us of a certain age remember Patty Hearst, daughter of a rich family who was kidnapped by a radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and, through fear and deprivation, was brainwashed into becoming a member of the group. The most frightening imprisonment possible is that of a mind completely controlled by an outside power. Science fiction is full of nightmare visions of this possibility, such as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. If the subject resists being broken and brainwashed, it must be killed—or lobotomized, like McMurphy in the mental institution of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The opposite of imprisonment is freedom, so that escape is an important part of the prison archetype. In fact, the defining myths of both the Old and New Testaments are myths of escape. In Jewish Scripture, which the Christian Bible appropriates as the Old Testament, the central event is the Exodus, and it is a narrative of liberation, in which the Hebrews escape slavery in Egypt, resulting not just in external freedom but in a new identity as the chosen people of God. The New Testament parallel for this is baptism, in which the immersion in water corresponds to the passage through the Red Sea. Baptism is an inward or spiritual escape from the “bondage” of sin—for sin imprisons us in selfish behavior patterns. Baptism is, then, really a prison break. According to the principle called typology, Biblical events keep repeating in new forms across history, becoming “types” that look forward to an “antitype” in which their meaning is revealed and fulfilled. The antitype of both the Exodus and of baptism is the ultimate prison break of the Resurrection. According to tradition, when Christ died, he descended into the prison of hell and released the good people who had been trapped there, although unpunished, because of the Fall, beginning with Adam and Eve themselves. This event, on Holy Saturday, is called the harrowing of hell, and medieval depictions show Christ emerging from the jaws of hell with a train of people in his wake. The jaws are often shown as literal: hell is a monster, a Leviathan, that has swallowed people, who are emerging from its fire-breathing jaws. As for Christ himself, he escapes from the prison of the tomb, the huge rock over its face rolled aside.
This event of escape from prison echoes throughout the Bible in two forms, one focusing on the escape itself and one on the invulnerability of good people falsely imprisoned. Paul spent a good deal of his career getting repeatedly arrested and thrown into prison. Four of the letters attributed to him, Philippians, Colossians, Ephesians, and Philemon, are sometimes known as the prison epistles because they were allegedly written from prison. Acts 16 recounts how Paul and his follower Silas were busted out of a prison by divine intervention: there was a great earthquake and everyone’s chains fell from them. But Paul did not leave the prison until he had converted the jailer and his household. The prison epistles were written under a threat of death, a death that Paul ultimately did not escape. Yet he writes, like Jonah, from the belly of the beast, using his situation to further his message of “Christian liberty.”
Paul’s Old Testament counterpart is Daniel, who was thrown into the lions’ den by Nebuchadnezzar but made friends with the lions (Dan. 6). Daniel had three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were thrown into a fiery furnace by the same king, yet the king’s counselor reported to him, “Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” The Apocrypha contains a brief addendum to this story, sometimes called “The Song of the Three Children” or young men. It is purportedly the hymn of praise that the three young men sang within the fire. Much of it consists of a catalogue of the various aspects of nature, calling upon them one at a time to praise the Lord: the sun and moon, the stars, the winds and fire and showers of dew, the nights and days, the ice and cold, the lightnings and clouds, the earth, mountains and hills, the things that grow in earth, the fountains, the whales, the fowls, the beasts, the children of men. Why call at such length upon nature to praise the one who has delivered the young men from death? While the text does not say so, there is a sense that nature itself is being liberated from its fallen form, that the Creation myth is being re-enacted, in which God created the natural world by the power of the Word and found it good. The image of the prison in the form of a fiery furnace actually appears much earlier in the Bible, in relation to the Exodus, I Deuteronomy 4:20: “But the Lord hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt...” We may find it an odd image for a prison, but it fits the larger pattern of Biblical imagery. In the Exodus, the Israelites are liberated by fire and water, as Tamino and Pamina are in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. These can be elements of death, but they are turned into elements of transformation. Later, the transforming furnace, in which elements are purified and smelted into new form, is the imagistic root of the concept of purgatory, the Biblical locus of which is I Corinthians 3:15, which says that people must pass through the fire, and that their work will be lost, but they will be saved.
We have arrived at the borderline where ideology gives way to the myth and metaphor of vision. We may aspire to a humane ideology of justice, but even the most humane system runs up against the limitations of reality, and we become aware that a humane prison is still a prison, and that the real prison is the present form of reality. Dickens indicates this awareness in Little Dorrit in one brief but powerful sentence:
The last day of the appointed week touched the bars of the Marshalsea gate. Black, all night, since the gate had clashed upon Little Dorrit, its iron stripes were turned by the early-glowing sun into stripes of gold. Far aslant across the city, over its jumbled roofs, and through the open tracery of its church towers, struck the long bright rays, bars of the prison of this lower world. (Chapter 30)
What chance is there of escape from the prison of this lower world, other than dying? Of all forms of popular music, folk and blues have perhaps the most direct relation to the experience of prison. As fans of traditional music may know, the collectors John and Alan Lomax toured many prisons during the 1930’s, especially in the South, recording performances by prisoners, some of whom sang songs about prison, and also about dreams of escape. At this point, I am startled by yet another of the synchronicities that typically attend this newsletter. Having written most of what you have just been reading, I just learned (thank you!), of a newly published book, The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music by Colin Asher. I have not yet had time to read it, but it most likely will tell readers more about the Lomax expeditions. The Lomaxes even discovered one of the great figures of folk and blues music, Huddie Ledbetter, or Leadbelly. They were instrumental at getting him out of prison, although they are also accused of exploiting him after that. In the Black musical tradition, hope of escape from prison readily drew upon the resources of gospel music that spoke of escape from the prison of this lower world.
And yet, at least some of the time, there was a form of hope that was more than otherworldliness. To escape from prison, you have to be a Trickster. A Trickster is someone who refuses to accept the limitations of reality, on the grounds that they are really just the limitations of social ideology in disguise. This can take some very sophisticated forms. A famous critical book, The Prisonhouse of Language, by Fredric Jameson, examines the philosophical claim that we cannot escape from power systems because the very structures of our thought, codified in the structures of our language, are prisons that limit the ways in which we are able to think. We cannot think or speak outside such imprisoning structures. We are rats in a verbal trap, and there is no escape from that labyrinth.
Well, that’s what Very Serious people say. To which my considered literary critical response would be something along the lines of: to hell with that. However, against the insistence on such verbal predestination, let me oppose two works. One is a song called “Long John,” a version of which was collected in 1934 by the Lomaxes, although the version I will quote is the one by Tom Rush that I have been singing for over 50 years. Long John has escaped, and is running “Like a turkey through the corn.” The Biblical hope makes an appearance: “But the Bible says” that “Every man who dies gonna live again.” However, Long John is not planning on dying. He is planning on outsmarting those who would imprison him with a Trickster’s device:
Now Long John had You know the strangest shoes Had a heel in front Had a heel behind And you never could tell Which way he’s goin’
The other work is the Coen brothers’ movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is a version of the Odyssey. Sort of. It is actually about the harebrained exploits of three convicts escaped from a Mississippi chain gang, with the central character named Ulysses and the plot events forming satirical parallels with episodes of Homer’s Odyssey. I think it is a far better movie, and far better version of the Odyssey, than Christopher Nolan’s clinically depressed version. It is especially relevant for its message, which lurks beneath all the slapstick and the silliness. The title is a clue to the movie’s purpose. It is a reference to a famous comedy by Preston Sturges called Sullivan’s Travels, dating from 1941. Sullivan has been making mindless comedies but aspires to making authentic art, so he sets off as a tramp to gather experience for a Very Serious social-message film about the poor and downtrodden. It does not go well, and Sullivan ends up in a prison camp doing hard labor. While there, he witnesses the prisoners’ delighted laughter over a Walt Disney cartoon, Playful Pluto from 1934, in the midst of the Depression. You know, Walt Disney, that vulgarian and shameless capitalist that Very Serious people are still sneering at. At the end, Sullivan is given permission to make his serious film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but instead chooses to continue making comedies. His last line in the film is, “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
The title Sullivan’s Travels evokes the travels in another famous satire, Gulliver’s Travels, but to the Coen brothers Sullivan’s travels also evoked those of Odysseus, which are full of laughter, though you would never know it from Nolan’s version.
The film’s Ulysses sings the traditional song “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” However, it tells you something that his backup group is called the Soggy Bottom Boys. Sorrow and high-spirited absurdity are a logical contradiction—but that paradox is the essence of the Trickster spirit.
Sturges’ film opens with a Dedication: “To the memory of those who made us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little, this picture is affectionately dedicated.” To the Tricksters, who help us escape. In all senses. Like a turkey through the corn.
Reference
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage, 1979.