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THE ROMANTIC PRISON T\)E Frencff Tradition VICTOR BROMBERT

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THE ROMANTIC PRISON T\)E Frencff Tradition VICTOR BROMBERT Ttye Romantic Prison Moritz von Schwind, "The Prisoner's Dream" (1836). Munich Sehackgalerie THE ROMANTIC PRISON T\)e Frencff Tradition VICTOR BROMBERT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton, New Jersey Copyright (C) 1978 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, NewJersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book This book has been composed in VIP Bembo Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, NewJersey ALSO BY VICTOR BROMBERT The Criticism of T.S. Eliot Stendhal et la voie oblique The Intellectual Hero The Novels of Flaubert Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom Flaubert par lui-meme NOTE: Originally published as La Prison romantique, Paris: Jose Corti, 1975. English text by the author. Some sections of this book appeared in an earlier form in Revue des Sciences Humaines, January-March 1965; Yale French Studies, 38, 1967; Novel, 1969; Symposium, xxm, 1969; Revue d'Histoire Litteraire de la France, March-April 1971; L'Arc, 57, 1974; Critique, November 1974. To Beth To Henri Peyre Contents I. PERSPECTIVES 1 Introduction: The Prison Dream 3 2 Pascal's Dungeon 18 3 The Myth of the Bastille 30 II. PRISON AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION 4 Petrus Borel: Prison and the Gothic Tradition 49 5 Stendhal: The Happy Prison 62 6 Victor Hugo: The Spaceless Prison 88 7 Nerval's Privileged Enclosures 120 8 Baudelaire: Confinement and Infinity 133 9 Huysmans: The Prison House of Decadence 149 III. THE UNGRASPABLE CAMP 10 Servitude and Solidarity 173 11 Sartre and the Drama of Ensnarement 185 12 Epilogue: The Borderline Zone 200 Notes 211 Bibliography 227 Index 237 I. Perspectives Il I Il Introduction: The Prison Dream The prisoner is a great dreamer.—Dostoevsky . this eternal image of the cell, always recurring in the poets' songs . —AlbertBeguin Prison haunts our civilization. Object of fear, it is also a sub­ ject of poetic reverie. The prison wish does exist. The image of immurement is essentially ambivalent in the Western tradi­ tion. Prison walls confine the "culprit," victimize the inno­ cent, affirm the power of society.1 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 Beguin remarked, are taken with the prison image. Is this because they have been frequent inmates of jails, ever since jails have existed? Beguin suggests a deeper reason: the poet sings of freedom. Between his voca­ tion and the prisoner's fate there appears to be "a natural and substantial bond, a significant affinity."2 For the freedom in question is of the mind; it can be attained only through with­ drawal 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 ter­ ror and oppression; that images of labyrinths, undergrounds, traps, buried secrets, crushing covers, and asphyxiating encir­ clements 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 ideolog­ ical reasons. The symbolic value attributed to the Bastille and other state prisons viewed as tyrannical constructs, the 4 Perspectives nightmarish architectural perspectives in the famous "Pri- gioni" etchings of Piranesi, the cruel fantasies of the Mar­ quis 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 un­ mistakable. Paul Jacob, one of the strangest figures of the pe­ riod, noted in his preface to Saintine's Picciola—the story of a disbeliever who regains his faith while in j ail—that the pris­ oner in his dungeon and the monk in his cell are "eternal sources of reverie and meditation."3 Fictional metaphors and social problems overlap. The monastic model is explicitly brought to bear on Utopian pe­ nology. Prison reform, very much debated since the end of the 18th century, became a burning issue under the Restora­ tion. 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, Leon Faucher (De la Riforme des prisons, p. 180) came to the conclusion that the original inspiration for prison punishment (hence the word Introduction 5 "penitentiary"!) was monastic existence, "voluntary peni­ tence." In 1847, the International Penitentiary Congress pro­ nounced itself in favor of solitary confinement.4 Isolation in the cell was to be redemptive, regenerative. Salvation and re­ habilitation 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.5 The monastic prison image is reflected in the popular imag­ ination. Prison inmates themselves seem aware of the metaphor. A recent survey by the politically activist GIP (Groupe d'Information sur Ies Prisons) quotes a prisoner in the "model" prison of Fleury Merogis: "No complaints about the cells. They're not very big, but they're clean. They're a little like a monk's cell" (gafait un peu cellule de moine).6 The underlying shuttle or reversibility of images is profoundly re­ vealed in a book that has left its imprint on generations of readers. Dantes, 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 seques­ tration into a symbol of security. Securum carcer facit. The motto is developed in lines that go back to the 17th century: Celui qui Ie premier m'osta la liberte Me mit en surete: 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.)7 But, even earlier, folklore, legends, fairy tales, the tradition of 6 Perspectives romance, provide variations on the theme of protective cus­ tody. 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. Psy­ choanalysis 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 eine Kerkerblume). In this perspective, the characteristic Romantic figure of the convict—the format—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 .
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