by: Jane Ciabattari
Legend has it that Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote was conceived
and at least partially written in prison – “where every discomfort has its place
and every mournful sound makes its home,” according to its opening lines..
Stripped of freedom and with his vision acutely attuned to the ironies of his
circumstances, Cervantes broke through the literary conventions of his time. Can
prison be a muse? It hardly seems desirable, when freedom is the condition most
of us would choose. Yet history shows that lasting work can be inspired by the
horrors and deprivations of incarceration. Authors with the intellectual grit to
endure have been rewarded with exceptional insights into human behaviour and
psychology. The tension between freedom and captivity has led to unexpected
creative breakthroughs.
Don Quixote contains “practically every imaginative technique and device used
by subsequent fiction writers to engage their readers and construct their
works,” writes Edith Grossman in the preface to her 2003 translation. Cervantes
anticipates realism, modernism, post-modernism, the frame story, the mixing of
genres, and more, all while maintaining that ironic wit. His device of
characters commenting upon the text in which they appear is centuries ahead of
its time.
Cervantes’ masterpiece seems to have been inspired by the physical and
psychological pressures of confinement, linking the first modern novel with the
prison experience. And Don Quixote has endured, interpreted by critics from
myriad angles, shaping the work of scores of writers in succeeding
generations.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky credits Don Quixote as a precursor to his portrait of a
positively good man, the naive epileptic Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. “Of the
good figures in Christian literature, the most complete is that of Don Quixote,”
he noted in 1868 while working on the novel. “But he is good only because at the
same time he is ridiculous.” Prince Myshkin, whose goodness blinds him to the
subtleties of deceit and betrayal, is unable to function in society. Like
Cervantes, Dostoyevsky presents the state of goodness as verging on madness.
Dostoyevsky, too, was profoundly changed by his prison experience. He had
already published his first novel, Poor Folk, when he was arrested in 1849 for
involvement with a group of leftist St Petersburg intellectuals. After months in
prison, he was sentenced to death, carted with others in his group to
Semyonovsky Square and prepared for the firing squad. At the last minute the
Tsar stayed his execution but Dostoyevsky spent four years of hard labour in
the Siberian gulag, where his educated status inflamed other inmates. “They are
a coarse, irritated, and embittered lot,” he wrote to his brother. “Their hatred
for the gentry passes all limits.”
Dreams of freedom
Dostoyevsky’s prison experience ushered in an awareness of the irrational and
of a sense of communal suffering. His best novels, including Crime and
Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, are gems of psychological insight. James
Joyce wrote that Dostoyevsky “created modern prose, and intensified it to its
present-day pitch.” Mikhail Bakhtin identified the ‘polyphonic’ qualities of
Dostoyevsky’s work, which expanded the novel to include many conflicting voices
rather than a single vision.
His 1861 novel From the House of the Dead, or Prison Life in Siberia, written
as fiction from the point of view of a man who has killed his wife, documents
his own prison experience. “Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times
dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom,” he writes. He explains the prison
trade in vodka and tobacco, the compulsion to steal. His fictional inmate
dreams of freedom relentlessly, as did its author.
This yearning for freedom while enduring the hardship of prison is a thread
through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary lifework, which began during his eight
years in Soviet labour camps. He was arrested in 1945 for making disparaging
remarks about Stalin in a letter. After finishing his sentence in 1955, he was
exiled to southern Kazakhstan. In solitude, beset by harrowing memories, he
composed his first novel, not expecting it to ever be published. One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich, set during one bitterly cold day in a Siberian labour
camp in 1951, was published in 1962, nine years after Stalin’s death, to global
acclaim. It was the first literary work to expose the degradations of the
Soviet regime’s gulags.
Solzhenitsyn wrote a series of novels, including The Cancer Ward, in which he
asked, “A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like
labour camps and exiles?” His masterwork The Gulag Archipelago, completed in
1968, is a massive three-volume indictment of the regime’s forced labour camps.
Subtitled An Experiment in Literary Investigation, it moves in excruciating
detail through the process of interrogation, transportation, imprisonment and
aftermath, including the massacre of inmates.
Solzhenitsyn drew on his own experience, hundreds of interviews and historic
documents. He distilled them into a shattering narrative that reveals the inner
workings of a murderous state within a state. His polyphonic form was noted in
the citation when Solzhenitsyn won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature: “each
person becomes the chief character whenever the action concerns him. This is not
just a technique, it is a creed. The narrative focuses on the only human element
in existence, the human individual, with equal status among equals, one destiny
among millions and a million destinies in one. This is the whole of humanism in
a nutshell, for the kernel is love of mankind.”
Clear vision
Examining the relationship of the individual to the state and the question of
goodness was also a theme of the 19th-Century American political thinker Henry
David Thoreau. Thoreau was deeply affected by the night he spent in prison for
refusing to pay a poll tax. “I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I
lived,” he wrote.
This episode inspired his 1848 speech Resistance to Civil Government, later
published as Civil Disobedience. “A minority is powerless while it conforms to
the majority,” he wrote, “… but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole
weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and
slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.” The insights Thoreau
developed from witnessing first-hand the power of the state to jail citizens,
had far-ranging consequences.
His thinking about the obligation of the individual to question the actions
of the State influenced generations of future thinkers from Leo Tolstoy to
Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. King’s 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, in
which he noted, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here,” is a classic
document in the civil-rights movement. King credited Thoreau with convincing him
that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as co-operation
with good. "No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting
this idea across than Henry David Thoreau,” King wrote. “As a result of his
writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative
protest."
It could be argued that Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Thoreau
might not have written so brilliantly without being inspired by prison.
Confinement is onerous, but there can be redeeming aspects. As these writers,
and countless others have shown, prison, in tandem with the spacious human
imagination and the dream of freedom, can inspire literary masterpieces.
from: BBC
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