Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century US Literature

Black Performance and Cultural Criticism Valerie Lee and E. Patrick Johnson, Series Editors Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film PETER CASTER THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PREss • COLUMBus Copyright © 2008 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Caster, Peter, 1972– Prisons, race, and masculinity in twentieth-century U.S. literature and film / Peter Caster. p. cm.—(Black performance and cultural criticism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8142–1073–4 (alk. paper) 1. Imprisonment in literature. 2. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Imprisonment in motion pictures. 4. Masculinity in literature. 5. Mas- culinity in motion pictures. 6. African Americans—Race identity. 7. Motion pictures and literature—United States. 8. American literature—Film and video adaptations. 9. Executions and executioners in literature. I. Title. PS228.I66C37 2008 810.9'3556—dc22 2007034428 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978–0–8142–1073–4) CD-ROM (ISBN 978–0–8142–9150–4) Cover design by Dan O’Dair Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Bembo Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Illustrations vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xix Chapter 1 Imprisonment in U.S. History and the Cultural Imagination 1 Chapter 2 Literary Execution: Race, Crime, and Punishment in Three Faulkner Novels 31 Chapter 3 Soul on Ice, Schizoanalysis, and the Subject of Imprisonment 59 Chapter 4 The Executioner’s Song and the Narration of History 83 Chapter 5 The Contradictions of “Documentary Realism” in American History X 107 Chapter 6 “Based upon a true story”: The Hurricane and the Problem of Prison Redemption 131 Chapter 7 The Farm: “This is no dream or nothing made up, this is for real” 151 Chapter 8 Staging Prisons and the Performance of History 173 Conclusion 195 Notes 209 Works Cited 251 Index 273 Illustrations Figure 1 Edward Norton in American History X. 119 Figure 2 American History X. 126 Figure 3 Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. 128 Figure 4 Edward Norton and Guy Torry in American History X. 129 Figure 5 Denzel Washington and Garland Whitt in The Hurricane. 137 Figure 6 Denzel Washington in The Hurricane. 143 Figure 7 Denzel Washington in The Hurricane. 149 Figure 8 The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison. 157 Figure 9 Vincent Simmons in The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison. 159 Figure 10 Logan “Bones” Theriot in The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison. 161 vii Preface T THE 1886 meeting of the National Prison Association,1 A Hamilton Mabie, who would later become an eminent literary scholar and editor of the turn-of-the-century United States, gave a lecture titled “The Press and Crime,” describing how newspapers and fiction shape the public perception of imprisonment. Four decades later, in 1929, the president of that organization, George C. Erksine, declared in his keynote address, “Probably never in recent times has the attention of the public been centered on crime and criminals as it is to-day. The head-lines of the morning paper, the table of contents of the current magazines, a casual glance at the shelves of any book store, the growing list of federal, state and municipal crime commis- sions, all bear witness to this modern trend.”2 The literary scholar and prison administrator both address the need for acknowledging the record of crime and punishment as it has been described in popular representations, whether fictional or not. Slowly, the NPA, which became the American Prison Association in 1908 and the American Correction Association in 1955, began to do so. In 1974 two of the nine papers presented on the psychological treatment of prisoners responded directly to Stanley Kubrick’s representation of prison “rehabilitation” in A Clockwork Orange (1971). Over the next two decades, prison administrators continued to ix Preface lament that imagined prisons shape public understanding of incarceration. In 1998 ACA President Reginald A. Wilkinson offered this anecdote: “I wrote a letter to the HBO producers of the dramatic series entitled: ‘Oz.’ I explained that the stereotyping and misrepre- sentations of the corrections profession in their drama is unacceptable. Of course, the response that I received was that the show was designed to ‘entertain’ and was not meant to depict reality.”3 Wilkinson’s criticism points to the permeability of imagination and actuality, particularly for audiences regularly fascinated by reality entertainment, and the complaint was echoed the next year by Angela Davis’s critique of skewed public perception due to the “grossly sensationalized genre of Hollywood prison films.”4 The evidence is on their side, as indi- cated in recent studies of actual police practices and representations of minorities in fictional crime series on television; one such study concludes that “the viewing of fictional programming may lead to associations of minorities with crime, victimization, and criminal jus- tice themes.”5 The vexed relationship of “fictional programming” and actuality in the representation of prisons gained clarity for me the summer of 2001, when a particular incident illustrated how the imagination of incarceration can overwrite its actuality. One Sunday afternoon Turner Network Television (TNT) featured Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994),6 a well-known Academy Award Best Picture nominee in which Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman play long-term convicts whose friendship redeems each of them. At the same time, the Discovery Channel screened the documentary Maximum Security Prisons—or rather it was scheduled, but there was a problem with the cable signal, and Discovery displayed only a blank monitor. That blankness contrasted sharply with The Shaw- shank Redemption, where actors play convicts on-screen, the characters sitting in a theater watching a Rita Hayworth film. When Andy Dufresne (Robbins) leaves the theater, he is attacked, brutally beaten, and presumably raped by a group referred to as “the Sisters.” On the Discovery Channel, Maximum Security Prisons ended and Supermax began its account of a high-security facility, but the signal remained blocked and the screen dark. Back on TNT, in The Shawshank Redemp- tion, Andy tries to get funding from the warden to buy new books for the prison library. Too much could be made of whatever technological glitch left Maximum Security Prisons unwatchable that afternoon—though Martin x Preface Luther King III cites a similar experience he had the same year, one he recounts in his keynote address at the 2001 ACA conference.7 There is a crucial lesson in the blank screen of Maximum Security Prisons as a documentary contrasted with the glossy and familiar look and characters of Frank Darabont’s film, with its coherent, humanist narrative, in which a white man imprisoned for a crime for which he is innocent learns about compassion from a black man who is guilty. The documentary would not have provided access to some unmedi- ated “real,” given that it, like The Shawshank Redemption, would feature the efforts of producers funding the venture, a director choosing and structuring scenes, editors building narrative continuity, and the rest of the production crew that make film and video such collaborative work. However, there are critical differences between depictions by actors and by prisoners, fictional narratives and documentaries, the realistic and the “real.” Certainly there are challenges to authenticity and the problems of the real, but an important separation remains between Freeman (playing Red) and Supermax prison inmate Kenny Collins, who speaks in the prison protest “Live from Death Row,”8 described in chapter 8. The difference between the popular Holly- wood film and the unseeable Discovery documentary illustrates one of the central tenets of this book: that actual prisons contrast sharply with their many representations in books, films, television, and other media. These screens of the imagination offer the projections of what is both hoped and feared to be true of prisons, places that are by definition difficult to access—except by black men, who enter far too easily. There is a simultaneous causality and disjuncture between the historical record and popular fictions, a difference that is particularly stark for imprisonment as it is endured by those within and imagined by those without. A largely unremarked tension exists between the set of social and institution practices of incarceration and its many descriptions varying in media, genre, popularity, and stakes in the real. Prisons are a ubiquitous part of how contemporary U.S. culture imagines itself, as suggested by the more than 250 U.S. films featur- ing men in prison and almost 100 focusing on women in prison.9 However, aside from the incarcerated population and those who work and visit there, actual prisons are closed off from visibility, thus cre- ating a space for imagined interiors, whether projected on-screen or cast on the page to reveal the mystery. Nevertheless, that unveiling often merely capitulates to the contradictory fantasies of audiences xi Preface who conceive of prisons in varied ways: as forces of order; places of rehabilitation; torture chambers of psychic, physical, and sexual violence; consolidations of uniformly violent, dangerous, and, most often, black criminals; medieval dungeons or high-tech facilities; or all of these at once. These fantasies, particularly in the absence of lived experience, prove formative for widely held assumptions regard- ing actual incarceration. Various critics of popular culture such as Henry A. Giroux, Ed Guerrero, and bell hooks argue that fictions shape public perception,10 but producers and audiences also speak to that matter themselves.

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