Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons

The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment

Martha Grace Duncan

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780814744260
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

An ex-convict struggles with his addictive yearning for prison. A law-abiding citizen broods over his pleasure in violent, illegal acts. A prison warden loses his job because he is so successful in rehabilitating criminals. These are but a few of the intriguing stories Martha Grace Duncan examines in her bold, interdisciplinary book Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons.

Duncan writes: "This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns - about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds." She portrays upright citizens who harbor a strange liking for criminal deeds, and criminals who conceive of prison in positive terms: as a nurturing mother, an academy, a matrix of spiritual rebirth, or a refuge from life's trivia. In developing her unique vision, Duncan draws on literature, history, psychoanalysis, and law. Her work reveals a nonutopian world in which criminals and non-criminals--while injuring each other in obvious ways--nonetheless live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, enriching each other's lives in profound and surprising fashion.

PART ONE

Cradled on the Sea: Positive Images of Prison and Theories of Punishment

My good, my gentle friend, my cell! My sweet retreat, mine alone, I love you so! If I had to live in all freedom in another city, I would first go to prison to acknowledge my own, those of my race.

—Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

CHAPTER I

A Thousand Leagues Above: Prison As a Refuge from the Prosaic

By “world” I mean the whole complex of incidents, demands, compulsions, solicitations, of every kind and degree of urgency, . . . which overtake the mind without offering it any inner illumination.

—Paul Valéry

Toward the end of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel The Cancer Ward, Oleg Kostoglotov is released from the hospital where he has been confined and goes to buy a shirt in a department store. While looking over the shirts, he hears a man ask the clerk, “Do you have a size twenty-five shirt like this one, with a size fifteen collar?” Oleg reacts with horror and righteous indignation to the small-mindedness that he feels this question reflects:

It staggered Oleg like an electric shock. He turned in amazement and looked at this clean-shaven, smooth man in the good felt hat, wearing a white shirt and tie, stared at him as though the man had struck him.

Men had endured the agony of the trenches, bodies had been heaped in mass graves, others had been buried in shallow pits in the icy Arctic, people had been arrested time and again and sent to camps, they had frozen in barred railroad cars, men had broken their backs working with pick and shovel to earn the price of a tattered padded jacket, and this sniveling fop remembered not only his shirt size, but his collar size?

This last fact shattered Oleg. He could not have imagined that a collar had its own separate size. Suppressing a groan, he turned his back on the shirt counter. A collar size, no less! Why such a refined life? Why return to this life? If you had to remember your collar size, you’d have to forget something. Something more important!¹

The cancer ward as depicted by Solzhenitsyn is not, of course, a prison, but it resembles one in important respects. Solzhenitsyn himself calls attention to the parallel, for he describes Oleg as thinking: “Emerging from these hospital gates—how did this differ from emerging from prison?”²

The incident of the collar size illustrates the former captive’s rejection of the trivial preoccupations that he finds in freedom. We see a similar reaction in a book by a very different kind of prisoner: an American who spent more than thirteen years in a Florida state penitentiary for breaking and entering, petit larceny, and burglary. During an interval of freedom, James Blake writes to a friend:

Another kind of nostalgia I’ve been fighting is the Brotherhood-Of-The-Doomed feeling I had in the penitentiary and no longer have, with nothing to put in its place. I’ve been trying hard to isolate and name this virus, and think I have. Thing is, it’s better than many things the world of electric toothbrushes has given me.³

In an earlier letter, written inside prison, he attempts to explain what attracts him to a life of confinement. Again, the words resonate with those of Oleg Kostoglotov: “Life has indeed been reduced to its simplest terms, a state of affairs not completely unpleasant. So many of the trimmings that go with life outside have often been merely confusing to me. The food here is simple but entirely adequate, as are the pleasures.”⁴ Blake’s words suggest a parallel between the allure of imprisonment and that of monastic life—a point that others have made explicitly.⁵

In a letter written just after returning to prison for another crime, Blake elaborates his vision of life outside prison as meaningless, frenetic activity:

Your concern over my welfare is indeed gratifying, . . . but the basic misconception of most civilians about convicts is that they suffer, when actually they are comparatively blithe and carefree. Certainly they’re not as harried as the gnomes I see on New York streets, scuttling and scurrying into subways like apprehensive White Rabbits.⁶

By contrast with this negative image of life in freedom, Blake names prison with a symbol of the eternal: “I’m still trying to make it here and resisting the awful temptation to go back to the peace and quiet of the Rock.”⁷

The image of prison as an island of calm amidst the hurly-burly also appears in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Here too we see a variation on this theme: prison as a place of endurance amidst ephemerae. Toward the end of the play, just after Lear and Cordelia are reunited, Cordelia asks: “Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?” Lear’s reply constitutes one of the loveliest carceral fantasies in literature. It suggests that he, who has been greatly troubled by possessions, and who suffers from guilt over his treatment of his youngest daughter, can look forward with rapture to an austere existence.

No, no, no, no! 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.⁸

The prisoners are still and endure, while those in freedom come and go.

Like James Blake and Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn imagines prison as a calm place in the midst of motion. In The First Circle, he depicts the sharashka (a special prison for intellectuals) as an ark resting on the water. He suggests that by virtue of their seclusion and relative stillness, the prisoners enjoy a truer perspective on life than they could attain from the outside world, which is rushing by: “From here, from the ark, . . . the whole tortuous flow of accursed history could easily be surveyed, as if from an enormous height, and yet at the same time one could see every detail, every pebble on the river bed, as if one were immersed in the stream.”⁹

Elaborating on his metaphor, Solzhenitsyn conceives of the prisoners as floating on the river, hence “weightless” in that they are free of prosaic concerns:

Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satiated. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for their children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony.¹⁰

Whereas this excerpt depicts prison as a calm but passionless abode, elsewhere Solzhenitsyn portrays prison as the place where one can engage life at its most profound level. In the following passage he describes the thoughts of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin on the occasion of his wife’s visit to the prison:

Seen from the outside [his life] appeared an unhappy one, but Nerzhin was secretly happy in that unhappiness. He drank it down like spring water. Here he got to know people and events about which he could learn nowhere else on earth, certainly not in the quiet, well-fed seclusion of the domestic hearth. From his youth on, Gleb Nerzhin had dreaded more than anything else wallowing in daily living. As the proverb says, “It’s not the sea that drowns you, it’s the puddle.”¹¹

The broadening experience of imprisonment is contrasted with the narrow “seclusion of the domestic hearth,” with wallowing in the quotidian, with drowning in a puddle.

In addition to the symbol of calm amidst motion, another image used to express the theme of prison as a refuge from the prosaic is that of a high place. Thus, in Stendhal’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma, the prison is constructed so far above the ground that Fabrizio refers to “this airy solitude.”¹² On the first night of his incarceration, Fabrizio spends hours at the window, “admiring this horizon which spoke to his soul.”¹³ In prison, he finds the happiness that had eluded him in freedom: “By a paradox to which he gave no thought, a secret joy was reigning in the depths of his heart.”¹⁴ Endeavoring to account for this paradox, Fabrizio reflects: “[H]ere one is a thousand leagues above the pettinesses and wickednesses which occupy us down there.”¹⁵

We see the same theme of prison as a cloister in Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of the meek Baptist, Alyoshka, in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. When the protagonist, Shukhov, tells him that prayer is ineffectual, since it cannot shorten one’s sentence, Alyoshka remonstrates: “‘You mustn’t pray for that.’ Alyoshka was horror-struck. ‘What d’you want your freedom for? What faith you have left will be choked in thorns. Rejoice that you are in prison. Here you can think of your soul.’”¹⁶ Shukhov reflects: “Alyoshka was talking the truth. You could tell by his voice and his eyes he was glad to be in prison.”¹⁷

A variation on the theme of prison as a refuge from the commonplace appears in Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, which concerns a Mexican priest imprisoned during a period of religious persecution. The following passage occurs following the priest’s release from prison, while he is hearing confessions in relative safety:

The old woman prattled on and on, . . . prattled of abstinence days broken, of evening prayers curtailed. Suddenly, without warning, with an odd sense of homesickness, he thought of the hostages in the prison yard, waiting at the water-tap, not looking at him—the suffering and the endurance which went on everywhere the other side of the mountains. He interrupted the woman savagely, “Why don’t you confess properly to me? I’m not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night . . . remember your real sins.”¹⁸

Here we see the priest’s nostalgia for prison as a place where serious things happen, where people suffer and acknowledge grave sins. To the trivial preoccupations of his civilian penitent, he opposes prison as an embodiment of what is “real.”

I have said that prison is often pictured as a refuge from the trivial or prosaic. But what is it a refuge for? Two principal themes emerge from the literature: prison as the quintessential academy and prison as a catalyst of intense friendship. The image of prison as an academy appears in Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle. Early in the book, Gleb Nerzhin elaborates on the ways that prison has developed his understanding of life. He says that as a free man he read books on the meaning of life or the nature of happiness but understood those works only superficially. “Thank God for prison!” he exclaims. “It gave me the chance to think.”¹⁹

Nerzhin goes on to tell a fellow prisoner that an understanding of happiness comes from recognizing that it does not depend on external blessings: “Remember that thin, watery barley or the oatmeal porridge without a single drop of fat? Can you say that you eat it? No. You commune with it, you take it like a sacrament. . . . [I]t spreads through your body like nectar. . . . Can you really compare the crude devouring of a steak with this?”²⁰ Compare the similar insight that Tolstoy attributes to Pierre in War and Peace: “While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.”²¹

The black American prisoner Samuel Melville perceives what he has learned in prison in much the same light:

for the first time since i was a small boy i have no money and no keys in my pockets, you can’t imagine the rehabilitating effect of that! from the muslims i am learning to fast and control my own body, from reading thoreau and some of the eastern teachings i can live on much less than even prison allows. . . . and i am tripping all the time, not with the frenzy of acid but with the confidence of my liberation from superficialities.²²

Whereas these prisoners regard prison as a place where they have gained wisdom, Malcolm X portrays his confinement as a catalyst of learning in a more concrete sense. In a chapter of his autobiography entitled “Saved,” he describes how he taught himself to read with understanding while in prison and how this ability opened up a new world to him. He believes that prison enabled him to study more intensively than would have been possible in college, where there are “too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.” He asks: “Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?”²³

Malcolm X views prison as a catalyst of learning in that it provides an environment free from worldly concerns. Other prisone...