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Overview
Professor Brombert points out that nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature endowed the prison image with unusual prestige, and he examines the historical and social reasons. After considering the influence of Pascal and of the myth of the Bastille, he closely analyzes the work of Borel, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Nerval, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Sartre, with excursions into texts by Byron, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, Sade, and others. His approach reflects a concern with the interaction of literature, historiography, and popular myth. This imaginative treatment deepens our understanding of Romanticism and its favored themes. It offers fresh thoughts as well about modern man's dialectical tensions between oppression and inner freedom, fate and revolt, and the awareness of the finite and the longing for infinity. A wide-ranging conclusion speculates about the future of the prison theme in a world that has been threatened by extermination camps.
Originally published in 1978.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691637945 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1604 |
| Pages: | 252 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Romantic Prison
The French Tradition
By Victor Brombert
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06352-2
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Prison Dream
The prisoner is a great dreamer. — Dostoevsky
... this eternal image of the cell, always recurring in the poets' songs ... — Albert Béguin
Prison haunts our civilization. Object of fear, it is also a subject of poetic reverie. The prison wish does exist. The image of immurement is essentially ambivalent in the Western tradition. Prison walls confine the "culprit," victimize the innocent, affirm the power of society. But they also, it would seem, protect poetic meditation and religious fervor. The prisoner's cell and the monastic cell look strangely alike.
Poets in particular, as Albert Béguin remarked, are taken with the prison image. Is this because they have been frequent inmates of jails, ever since jails have existed? Béguin suggests a deeper reason: the poet sings of freedom. Between his vocation and the prisoner's fate there appears to be "a natural and substantial bond, a significant affinity." For the freedom in question is of the mind; it can be attained only through withdrawal into the self. It is the turbulence of life that the poet — a "spiritual anarchist" — comes to view as exile or captivity.
Romanticism, especially in France, has endowed the prison symbol with unusual prestige. This is not to deny that grim jails — real and metaphoric — served to bring out themes of terror and oppression; that images of labyrinths, undergrounds, traps, buried secrets, crushing covers, and asphyxiating encirclements provided the symbolic decor for a tragic awareness. The motif of the gloomy prison became insistent toward the end of the 18th century, in large part for political and ideological reasons. The symbolic value attributed to the Bastille and other state prisons viewed as tyrannical constructs, the nightmarish architectural perspectives in the famous "Prigioni" etchings of Piranesi, the cruel fantasies of the Marquis de Sade conceived in prison and projected into further enclosed spaces, the setting of Gothic novels in dungeons, vaults, and oubliettes — all this can tell us a great deal about the structures of the Romantic imagination, and the favored dialectical tensions between oppression and the dream of freedom, between fate and revolt, between the awareness of the finite and the longing for infinity.
The link between enclosure and inner freedom is at the heart of the Romantic sensibility. The title of Stendhal's novel, La Chartreuse de Parme, has puzzled many a reader, not merely because Parma is without a charterhouse, but because not even a fictional charterhouse appears in the novel's field of vision. It is clear, however, that the charterhouse in question is really none other than the Farnese Tower — in other words, the prison-fortress. The title thus proposes the central metaphor, as well as the parable of a fear translated into a blessing. The link between enclosure and spirituality is unmistakable. Paul Jacob, one of the strangest figures of the period, noted in his preface to Saintine's Picciola — the story of a disbeliever who regains his faith while in jail — that the prisoner in his dungeon and the monk in his cell are "eternal sources of reverie and meditation."
Fictional metaphors and social problems overlap. The monastic model is explicitly brought to bear on utopian penology. Prison reform, very much debated since the end of the 18th century, became a burning issue under the Restoration. The controversy, which was to reach fever pitch under the July Monarchy, centered on the question of the cellular prison regime. Was the cell a redemptive punishment? Tocqueville and Beaumont travelled to the United States to observe and compare the model penitentiaries in Philadelphia and Auburn. Which was preferable, the cenobitic or the anchoritic system? One thing was clear: the monastic model seemed the pattern for the future. In 1838, Léon Faucher (De la Réforme des prisons, p. 180) came to the conclusion that the original inspiration for prison punishment (hence the word "penitentiary"!) was monastic existence, "voluntary penitence." In 1847, the International Penitentiary Congress pronounced itself in favor of solitary confinement. Isolation in the cell was to be redemptive, regenerative. Salvation and rehabilitation were increasingly viewed as dependent on the privacy of the cell. Punitur ne pecatur: a prison historian somewhat ironically recalls this formula, after reminding his readers that it was the French Revolution, destroyer of the Bastille, which elevated prison to the dignity of rational punishment.
The monastic prison image is reflected in the popular imagination. Prison inmates themselves seem aware of the metaphor. A recent survey by the politically activist GIP (Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons) quotes a prisoner in the "model" prison of Fleury Mérogis: "No complaints about the cells. They're not very big, but they're dean. They're a little like a monk's cell" (ça fait un peu cellule de moine). The underlying shuttle or reversibility of images is profoundly revealed in a book that has left its imprint on generations of readers. Dantès, the hero-prisoner of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, is fated to be reborn and liberated in the cell occupied by the monastic figure of Father Faria. The prisoner-monk and the monk-prisoner: the two images converge in Alexandre Dumas' novel.
The place of enclosure and suffering is also conceived of as the protected and protective space, the locus of reverie and freedom. Our tradition is rich in tales that transmute sequestration into a symbol of security. Securum carcer facit. The motto is developed in lines that go back to the 17th century:
Celui qui le premier m'osta la liberté
Me mit en sureté:
De sa grace je suis hors de prise et de crainte.
(He who first took away my freedom
Put me in safety:
Thanks to him, I am beyond reach and fear.)
But, even earlier, folklore, legends, fairy tales, the tradition of romance, provide variations on the theme of protective custody. The motif occurs repeatedly in Renaissance epics. The magician Atlantes builds an enchanted castle to lock up his favorite hero Rogero, the better to shield him from danger. Merlin renders similar service in the Arthurian legend. Psychoanalysis has since confirmed the yearning for the enclosed space, the latent fear of the threatening outside. Agoraphobia is a recognizable symptom. Constriction is not necessarily a feared condition. Bertram D. Lewin, in The Psychoanalysis of Elation, suggests that the idea of the closed space corresponds not to an anxiety phantasm but to a phantasm of safety.
But with the safety dream goes the dream of freedom through transcendence. The spirit wills itself stronger than prison bars.
Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron bars a Cage ...
writes the poet Richard Lovelace, who sings of the victory of the prisoner's mind over suffering:
Tryumph in your Bonds and Paines,
And daunce to th' Musick of your Chaines.
It is in the same spirit that Byron conjures up the figure of the poet-prisoner Tasso to extol the tragic liberation through confinement. The "wings" of the mind make it possible to soar beyond oppressive walls:
For I have battled with mine agony,
And made me wings wherewith to overfly
The narrow surface of my dungeon wall.
Heine's famous epigram is apposite: "The love of freedom is a prison flower" (Die Freiheitsliebe ist cine Kerkerblume). In this perspective, the characteristic Romantic figure of the convict — the forçat — acquires a special meaning. Larger even than the figure of revolt (Balzac's convict Vautrin) looms the figure of salvation (Hugo's convict Jean Valjean). For, in its mythic dimension, the carceral imagery implies the presence of a threshhold, the possibility of a passage, an initiation — a passage from the inside to the beyond, from isolation to communion, from punishment and suffering to redemption, from sadness to that profound and mysterious joy which poets such as Hugo associate with the eternal secret of human bondage.
The prison fear and the prison dream have been powerful literary themes. But never, it would seem, have they so persistently pressed themselves on the writer's imagination as during the 19th century. History and politics are no doubt largely responsible. The arbitrary arrests (lettres de cachet) and the state prisons of the Ancien Régime, the symbolism of the Bastille and of its epic fall, the revolutionary jails, the political detentions throughout Metternich's Europe, the shadow of the Spielberg, where Silvio Pellico and other victims languished, the police repressions of popular uprisings — all conspired to dramatize and poetize the prison image. This pervasive prison concern explains in part why the 19th-century sensibility was incapable of separating moral indignation from poetic vision. The ambivalence was to be vividly illustrated, toward the end of the century, in the fictional biography of the revolutionary socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui. Gustave Geffroy's L'Enfermé (The Captive) is a documentary novel on the strange destiny of this political activist whose prison vocation made him live out his own fiction. For Blanqui, the enfermé, viewed himself as determined by literary models: the Mont-Saint-Michel fortress, where he and other inmates became fascinated with the prison fate of Silvio Pellico, is repeatedly referred to as the "French Spielberg"; his "cup of bitterness" makes of him, in his own eyes, a "Job" and a victim of "Dante's hell"; the spiritual "freedom" discovered in jail becomes so precious to him that, having returned to "free life," he reconstructs his own cell. "Prison followed the man, reconstituted itself around him by his own volition, no matter where he was."
The Romantic imagination exploits the dramatic potential of sequestration and exile. But the importance of the carceral themes is clearly prefigured in the literature of the 18th century. The nightmarish locales of the Gothic novel indicate a yearning for the irrationality of depths and labyrinthine constriction. Their oneiric structures are graphically confirmed in Piranesi's imaginary prisons, his carceri d'invenzione. These dizzying descents to the underground, these crushing stone constructs, appear again in many a Romantic text. But it is not fortuitous if the taste for Piranesi and for Sade's rape scenes (always in situations of confinement) corresponds historically to the growing dream of political freedom and individual dignity. The 18th century is known to be the age of "reason"; but it is also — especially as the century comes to a close — an age that delighted in horror, and was fascinated by all the manifestations of coercion. The obsession with walls, crypts, forced religious vocations, inquisistional procedures, parallels the beginnings of a revolt against arbitrariness.
Imaginary plight and real plight reflect each other. Events were to confirm the latent sense of anguish. Many families, at this turning point of history, underwent the harrowing experience of imprisonment. It was in prison that Andre Chenier composed some of his most powerful poems. The new century added further distress. For the young Hugo, as for the young Vigny, the word "prison" was to retain a grim resonance. The fall of Napoleon plunged Europe into a renewed fear of political detentions. If the image of the Bastille, after 1815, continued to function as a symbol, this is because it had come to mean more than itself. This Bastille metaphor was clearly understood as a meaningful anachronism: the prisons of post-Napoleonic, reactionary Europe were being denounced obliquely. Michelet, for whom the Bastille myth was a lasting inspiration, diagnosed the anachronism. He knew full well that, from the Spielberg to Siberia, Europe was covered with prisons more terrible than the destroyed Bastille. Casanova, who had been detained in the infamous Piombi of Venice, knew it too: "I have seen at the Spielberg, in Moravia, prisons far more gruesome...." It is against this political background that one must assess the prestige of Casanova, Cellini, Sade, Baron von der Trenck, Latude, Linguet, Pellico, Andryane, as well as many other prison heroes past and present.
Certain favorite themes might also explain the intense interest of Romantic writers in the prison image: tragic beauty of solitude, glorification of the individual and concern for the problem of identity, existential anguish (Freud was later to insist on the relation between Angst and angustiae), spatio-temporal motifs (arrested prison time viewed as an utopian atemporality), exaltation of the rebellious outlaw who indicts society as a prison and himself becomes the hero of a double drama of fall and redemption, pride in any punishment under the dual aegis of Prometheus-Lucifer.
The topoi, or commonplaces, of prison literature can also be listed: the sordid cell and the hospitable cell, the cruelty of jailors (but also the presence of the "good" jailor), glimpses of the landscape and of the sky, the contrast between the ugliness of the "inside" and the supposed splendor of the surrounding scenery, prisons within the prison (the image of the iron mask), the insanity of the captive, the inscriptions in the stone, the symbolism of the wall as an invitation to transcendence. If even the most atrocious jail can be transformed into a mediating space where consciousness learns to love despair and takes full possession of itself, it is no doubt because — as Gaston Bachelard put it — man is a "great dreamer of locks." Even man's consolatory prison activities, as repeatedly presented in Romantic literature, betray the urge to exploit creatively the possibilities of concentration and expansion. On the one hand, mental prowess and experimentation (geometric progressions formulated without help of paper, imaginary chess games); on the other hand, an outward reach, love at a distance (often for the jailor's daughter), conversations with the beloved (in fairy tales the beloved may be changed into a bird!), a movement of the mind toward the outside which makes the prisoner reinvent communication. For the "other" remains a presence. Hence the obsession with writing, secret alphabets, tappings on the walls, underground communications.
Two opposing and simultaneous movements can here be followed: the one toward an inner center (a search for identity, knowledge, the operations of memory); the other toward a transcending outside which corresponds to the joys of the imagination and the ecstasy of spiritual escape. Intimacy with the elusive self is the aim of the first movement, the quest within. Essentially unheroic, the movement toward the internal cell of meditation corresponds to a nocturnal lyricism, to a quest for authenticity which, at its extreme point, tolerates no histrionics, leaves no room for any pose. Novalis speaks of the mysterious road that leads to this interior region. The most diverse texts, in our literary tradition, confirm this association of the prisoner's descent into the self with the quest for a personal truth, the quest for an original identity. Robinson Crusoe is an exemplary figure: on his prison-island, he is quick to create further limits within limits; he builds a fortification, he erects walls, not merely to ward off danger, but to surround himself, to confine himself — and thus to define himself. Rousseau, on another island, dreams of living for the rest of his life as a happy prisoner. In one of the basic texts for an understanding of Romanticism — the fifth "Promenade" in the Rêveries (where the Bastille image occurs in association with the very notion of reverie) — Rousseau describes his happy stay on the island of Saint Pierre, and expresses the desire to see the island refuge become for him a "prison perpetuelle." The key words (circonscrite, enfermé, asile, confiné) all suggest an interiorization of the prison image which corresponds to the sense of almost God-like self-sufficiency (this state in which "on se suffit à soi-même comme Dieu"), and points to the central metaphor of Rousseauistic solipsism: "... ce séjour isolé où je m'étais enlacé de moi-même ..." (this isolated abode where I did entwine with myself ...).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Romantic Prison by Victor Brombert. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- 1. Introduction: The Prison Dream, pg. 3
- 2. Pascal's Dungeon, pg. 18
- 3. The Myth of the Bastille, pg. 30
- 4. Petrus Borel: Prison and the Gothic Tradition, pg. 49
- 5. Stendhal: The Happy Prison, pg. 62
- 6. Victor Hugo: The Spaceless Prison, pg. 88
- 7. Nerval's Privileged Enclosures, pg. 120
- 8. Baudelaire: Confinement and Infinity, pg. 133
- 9. Huysmans: The Prison House of Decadence, pg. 149
- 10. Servitude and Solidarity, pg. 173
- 11. Sartre and the Drama of Ensnarement, pg. 185
- 12. Epilogue: The Borderline Zone, pg. 200
- Notes, pg. 211
- Bibliography, pg. 227
- Index of Proper Names, pg. 237