SOURCE: Brombert, Victor. “The Happy Prison: A Recurring Romantic Metaphor.” In Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities, edited by David Thornburn and Geoffrey Hartman, pp. 62-79. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.

[In the following essay, Brombert reviews the many variations on the theme of the prison in Romantic literature, including the prison as a place of fortunate solitude and as an opportunity for escaping temporal and physical restraints to spiritual development. Brombert suggests that the Romantics' emphasis on the individual prisoner allowed for a more poetic view of imprisonment than would become possible in the twentieth century, when the horrors of collective prisoners would be a familiar image.]

Et le bonheur est une forte prison.

—Paul Claudel

What causes King Lear's elation, toward the end of the play, at the thought of going to prison? “Come, let's away to prison”—he seems almost impatient to be locked up. How is one to explain this impatience and hint of joy? Is it battle fatigue (he has indeed incurred the worst!); is it mental derangement, is it despair? All is lost, to be sure—but Cordelia has been found. In twelve intensely suggestive lines, Shakespeare indicates the reasons for this unexpected delight. For father and daughter, prison will be an enchanted cage. Indeed like “birds i' the cage” they will be able to sing their poem of love, forgiveness and innocence:

                                                                                                    So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies.

In this cage they will feel freed from life's snares and servitudes; they will—so the old king dreams—be endowed with a superior vision and glimpse the mystery of things “as if [they] were God's spies.” In short, prison is here conceived as the locus of spiritual freedom and revelation.

A very similar joy is experienced in Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, though by a young man and in a different register, namely by the hero Fabrice del Dongo, as he is locked up in the cell of the Farnese tower and discovers to his surprise the lyric potential of incarceration. He who feared the Spielberg fortress, as a symbol of reactionary despotism, now allows himself to be charmed by the “douceurs de la prison”: the altitude, the splendid view, Clelia Conti's birds (they too are locked up in their “lovely cages”: cages within a cage)—all contribute to bringing about a secret joy that Fabrice can only translate into an interrogation: “Is this truly a prison? is this what I feared so much?” Here, too, imprisonment implies a purification and the experience of freedom. In his “solitude aérienne” Fabrice feels far removed from the worldly pettiness of Parma. Fortress of dreams and amorous contemplation, the Farnese tower stands in Stendhal's metaphoric landscape very clearly on the side of happiness, and from this happiness Fabrice has no desire to escape.

Examples of the happy prison abound in Romantic literature. I am referring less to a period concept than to a form of imagination which expands beyond a given historical period. The illustrations taken from Shakespeare and Stendhal suggest a double tradition, of a theme and of metaphor. The image of immurement is essentially ambivalent in the western tradition: the walls of the cell punish the culprit and victimize the innocent; but they also protect poetic meditation and religious fervor. The prisoner's cell and the monastic cell look strangely alike. There exists no doubt a nostalgia for enclosure, as well as a prison wish. “The sweet prison cells” (“les douces cellules de la prison”), writes Jean Genêt, for whom incarceration appears as a guarantee of peace, security, stripping of all vain lendings—in other words a return to the self.¹ The released prisoner's agoraphobia is a well-known motif: it is the fear of the threatening outside. Psychology and psychoanalysis have much to say on this subject. Bertram D. Lewin, in The Psychoanalysis of Elation (New York: Norton, 1950), suggests that the idea of the closed space corresponds not to an anxiety fantasy but to one of safety, of being in hiding. Poets, novelists, intuited as much: Balzac in one of his most astonishing melodramatic and symbolic scenes, shows us the great criminal and escape-artist Vautrin newly locked up in the prison of the Conciergerie, inspecting his cell to make sure that not a single hole might allow for the intrusion of a foreign glance. He carefully probes all the walls and then paradoxically concludes, in the heart of his dark jail, “Je suis en sûreté”—“I am safe!”

This is not to deny that real and metaphoric jails serve the theme of terror and oppression, that images of labyrinths, undergrounds, traps, buried secrets, crushing covers and asphyxiating encirclements have haunted the Romantic imagination, providing a symbolic décor for a tragic awareness. The motif of the gloomy prison becomes especially insistent toward the end of the 18th century—no doubt, in large part, for political and philosophical reasons. The symbolic value attributed to the Bastille and other political or state prisons viewed as tyrannical constructs, the nightmarish architectural perspectives in the famous “Prigioni” etchings of Piranese, the cruel fantasies of the Marquis de Sade conceived in prison and projected into further enclosed spaces, the setting of the Gothic novels in dungeons, vaults and oubliettes—all this tells us a great deal about the structures of the Romantic imagination, and the favored dialectical tensions between oppression and the dream of freedom, between fatality and revolt, between the finite and infinity.

But one need only evoke Pascal to realize that the metaphoric correspondence between imprisonment and the human condition is not a new idea. The notions that the soul is tragically encaged in the body, that the body is tragically exiled in the world's prison, are commonplaces in the Gnostic, Christian, and Neo-Platonic tradition. The Pythagorian pun on the terms soma-sema (body-tomb) is well-known. If writers, after the classical age, insist particularly on the prison image, this is no doubt bound up with a poetization of suffering and of a tragic condemnation. Thus Alfred de Vigny, filled with his readings of Pascal, denounces all vain hope: “Dans cette prison nommée la vie, d'où nous partons les uns après les autres pour aller à la mort” (“In this jail called life …”).² But inversely—and this seems revealing—the documentary and humanitarian texts describing prison conditions in the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods, even when avowedly rationalistic and documentary, tend to poetize imprisonment. Beccaria, denouncing the “fredda atrocità” of jails in Dei Delitti e delle pene, evokes the tragedy of time, the oppressive and erosive workings of the imagination. Texts such as Des Lettres de cachet et des Prisons d'état by Mirabeau, or La Bastille dévoilée and Mémoires historiques et authentiques sur la Bastille, as well as the famous Mémoires of the state prisoners Linguet and Latude, all have in common mythopoeic tendencies; their denunciation is also a metaphoric amplification: the poetry of silence and allusions to Dante's Inferno go together with mythological images of Cerberus, Charon, of the Hydra, of caverns, of Tartarus.

The confrontation with anguish and nothingness in a prison setting is a recurrent motif, fully and almost abusively exploited by Romantic as well as by Existentialist writers. Hugo, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus—to name but a few—have thus dramatized the tête-à-tête with ultimate fear. The alienation is seen as twofold, social as well as visceral. Leonid Andreev, in The Seven Who Were Hanged, admirably conveys the situation of the condemned prisoner as he views his cigarette and cigarette-holding hand with surprise and terror. Few images, it would seem, lend themselves more readily to a suggestion of absurdity or negativity than that of the cell. What better illustration than the admirable ninth stanza of The Prisoner of Chillon where Byron, by means of a series of negative constructions (no thought, no feeling, not night, not day, not even dungeon-light) suggests the loss of consciousness within the context of stagnant atemporality! All he apprehends is

                    vacancy absorbing space,
And fixedness—without a place.

As for spatial despair, it has been analyzed by Jung and others concerned with extra-terrestrial projections and cosmic dreams. The entire work of Victor Hugo is an illustration of the desire and hope for a breakthrough. The recurrent image of the wall, the enigma of this wall and of the massive jail door, function in his case as part of a vast soteriological scheme. On the one hand there is the desperate observation

Nous sommes au cachot, la porte est inflexible.

But the answer is always ready. To the cry “Ouvrez les soupiraux” corresponds the clinking of the mysterious keys.

On entend le trousseau des clefs mystérieuses
          Sonner confusément.(3)

Finally, among the images of the tragic prison most favored by the Romantics there are those which interiorize the experience of claustration, and in particular the image of the skull or the brain. Victor Hugo, once again, provides rich illustration. The “noir cerveau” of Piranesi in the poem The Magi prepares for the metaphor of the brain-jail (“crâne-cachot”) where the infamous spider suspends its web. There is an obvious association between Hugo's walled-in images of the brain and Baudelaire's brain-as-rotten-ceiling: same spider web, same blind animal, same lack of light. But there is one significant difference—and on that difference hinges the very ambivalence of the prison metaphor. For Baudelaire, the unfathomable sadness of all vaults implies ideas of asphyxia and lethal oppression; the refuge in solipsism involves the terror of being buried alive. For Hugo, on the other hand, man's captive mind will hear the jingling of the mysterious keys, the doors—all doors—will open, not only jails but Hell itself will be abolished, a universal liberation will come about. What is involved is the very activity of the poet as a liberating, almost divine force—for what the brain of the poet holds locked up preciously is nothing less than the infinite dimension of poetry and the secret of the world. “Un poète est un monde enfermé dans un homme.”⁴

The ambivalence of the metaphor may help explain the Romantic fascination with the image of the sequestered poet, and in particular the fortune of a legend: that of the mad, enchained bard, Torquato Tasso. For in its larger mythic dimension, the carceral imagery implies the presence of a threshold, 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 Hugo von Hoffmansthal, in Die Frau ohne Schatten, associates with the eternal secret of human bondage—“das ewige Geheimnis der Verkettung alles Irdischen.”

We are back to the “mystery of things” which the prisoner as God's spy will take upon himself; we have come full back to the theme of the happy prison. It would appear that this theme of the happy prison is only an apparent contradiction, that there is here a dialectical logic. It is this kind of logic that determines Benvenuto Cellini in his Vita—an autobiography much prized by the Romantics—to write a chapter entitled “In Lode di detta prigione” and to insist—he the fiery adventurer-artist!—on a spiritual initiation in prison.

Chi vuol saper quant'è il valor de dio,
e quant'un uomo a quel ben si assomiglia,
convien che stie'n prigione, al parer mio.

Very similar effusions seem to inspire the famous Le Mie Prigioni by Silvio Pellico, the Milanese liberal who experienced years of carcere duro in Metternich's political prison, the Spielberg. Friends of Pellico later reproached him his Christian lyricism, discovered in jail, as a weakness. But the unusual success of the book (in France alone there were five translations during the first year after publication, in 1833) suggests that its tone had immense appeal. Beyond the clichés of prison literature (the good jailer, the beautiful panorama, the view of the sky, the familiarity and friendship with spiders, the contrasts between the ugliness and horror of the inside and the splendor of the surrounding landscape), Pellico insists on the rediscovered light; he copies with deep emotion the edifying graffiti on the walls (“Benedico la prigione”): he glorifies suffering.

What does all this mean if not that the real and the metaphoric prison assume the value of holy place? “A prison is a sacred asylum,” affirms one of the characters in Petrus Borel's Madame Putiphar. And Byron, whose Prisoner of Chillon explains in the last stanza that “These heavy walls to [him] have grown / A hermitage,” writes even more explicitly in the Sonnet on Chillon (referring to “the eternal spirit of the chainless mind”):

Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,
                                        And thy sad floor an altar …

Poets seem to entertain a particular affection for the world of walls, bars, and locks. Leopardi, in his imaginary dialogue between Tasso and his “genio familiare” exalts sequestration because it rejuvenates the soul (“ringiovanisce l'animo”) and galvanizes the imagination—the “virtu di favellare”: the locked-in individual in his solipsistic “recreation” learns how to enter into dialogue with the self, learns how to “conversare seco medesima.” Gérard de Nerval imagines the jailer as eternally jealous of the prisoner's dreams. Tristan Corbière, in his poem entitled Libertà—A la cellule IV bis (prison royale de Gênes), proclaims the joy of imprisonment:

          jamais [je] n'ai chanté
Que pour toi, dans ta cage,
Cage de la gaîté!

The joyous cage is here explicitly associated with the creative act. And this indeed is the most important feature of this “cage de la gaîté”: it involves the very function of the poet.

Prison sûre conquête
Où le poète est roi.

The notion of a conquest relates no doubt to the unavoidable and fecund tension between vision and order, between the freedom of imagination and the discipline of form.

Dans un cauchemar de verrous
L'Ordre est né

writes a more recent poet.⁵

One could no doubt pause here to open several large parentheses. Aesthetically speaking, the Romantic mind, attracted to the picturesque, the historical detail, the ominous setting, exploits the dramatic and melodramatic potential of any situation of sequestration and exile. But this poetic prestige is not separable from an ethical valorization. What is involved is the significance of any condemnation, which also means the significance of any destiny and of any rebellion against it—even and perhaps especially if that destiny is self-chosen. If on one level the act of writing implies a tension and ideal reconciliation between “inspiration” and constraining will, this aesthetic dilemma is a figuration of an abstract struggle between forces of freedom and forces of constraint. It is revealing that Baudelaire, who lived this aesthetic and ethical conflict more acutely perhaps than any other Romantic writer, should have admired Edgar Allan Poe for his prisoner-destiny (all of the United States, according to Baudelaire, was for Poe a “vaste prison”), and at the same time also for his lesson of aesthetic control. What Baudelaire says of the sonnet, of the relationship between any constricting form (“formes contraignantes”) and a perspective on infinity, is crucial to an understanding of his poetry.⁶

Balzac views the rapport of the writer to confinement in a different light; he is certainly not concerned with form as constriction (not he, Balzac!), but with the very locus of creative suffering in which the artistic creator, any creator, is himself locked up or chooses to be locked up. Hence the recurring image, in Balzac's work, of the writer's prison garret, the place of austerity and abnegation and self-discipline, from which, however, the roofs of the capital as well as the sky can be seen, much as an opening unto the world beyond. This garret, prison and watchtower, sordid enclosure of the loftiest vocation, is defined in the Balzacian metaphor as a sépulcre aérien, an almost supra-terrestrial tomb in which the artist dies to life (that is, to all the temptations of Paris beyond that window) in order to live the life of the spirit, and by so doing, consents, not without regret and bitterness, to make a true monastic sacrifice in view of an ultimate salvation.

The Romantic quality of such an image becomes even more apparent if one recalls that Rousseau, in much the same spirit, conceives of the Bastille as the ideal place to write on the subject of liberty. In one of the key texts of Romanticism—the fifth “Promenade” in the Rêveries (where the Bastille image again occurs in association with the very notion of revery)—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 perpétuelle.” The telling words in this text (“circonscrite,” “enfermé,” “asile,” “confiné”) all suggest an interiorization of the prison image which corresponds to the sense of almost divine self-sufficiency (this state in which “on se suffit à soi-même comme Dieu”), and all correspond in fact to the central metaphor of Rousseauistic solipsism: “ce séjour isolé où je m'étais enlacé de moi-même …” (“where I did entwine with myself”).

Perhaps the most remarkable in this respect is the dialectical link—very strong throughout the Western tradition—between a visible loss and an invisible, secret victory. This paradox underlies the theme of the happy prison; it is of course not unrelated to the Christian notion of a lost paradise and a felix culpa. Robinson Crusoe, a hero very much in favor with the Romantics, declares that he has never been happier than in his “forsaken solitary condition,” and gives thanks to God for having there opened his eyes, for providing cause “to praise Him for dungeons and prisons.”⁷

We are touching here on one of the fundamental aspects of Romanticism: the value conferred on solitude. The title of Stendhal's novel, The Charterhouse of Parma, has puzzled some readers, not only because Parma has no charterhouse, but because in the novel itself the charterhouse does not appear except as a withdrawal from Parma in the very last pages. But it is evident that the real charterhouse in the novel is the Farnese Tower which indeed does occupy the center of the landscape: in other words, the prison. The title of the novel thus proposes the central metaphor, as well as the parable of a fear translated into a blessing. Similarly, Julien Sorel, in The Red and the Black, discovers that the only discomfort in prison has to do with his not being able to lock the door from the inside, and thus shut out the world. He rediscovers the truth proclaimed by Saint Bernard: “O solitudo, sola beatitudo …”—a poetry of silence and serenity in which the gloomiest dungeon is metamorphosed into a felicitous space. Even the fearful incarceration in the Prisoner of Chillon is converted into a precious solitude, a second home. “Even I,” he concludes, “regained my freedom with a sigh.”

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 puts it—man is a “great dreamer of locks.”⁸ Even man's consolatory prison activities, as repeatedly viewed in Romantic literature, betray the urge to exploit creatively, as it were, the physical and abstract realities of concentration and expansion. On the one hand, mental prowess and experimentation (geometric progressions formulated without help of paper, imaginary chess games, sadistic or masochistic choreographies); on the other hand, an outward reach: love at a distance, conversation with the beloved (in fairy tales this often turns out to be the beloved changed into a bird!), an 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, discovery of self); the other toward a transcending outside which corresponds to the ecstasy of spiritual escape. Intimacy with the elusive self is the aim of the first movement, the quest within. Essentially unheroic (for heroism, or the heroic stance, requires an audience), the movement toward the internal cell of meditation corresponds to the 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 toward 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 truth, even the quest for an identity. Robinson Crusoe, once again an exemplary figure, is quick to create on his prison-island further limits within limits: he builds a fortification, he surrounds himself with walls, not only to ward off danger but to surround himself, to confine himself—and thus to define himself. He makes a puritan inventory of his own being.

Yet, as Albert Béguin remarked—and precisely in talking about Novalis—the inward movement implies a glance toward external reality, an ascent, an expansion. Here again the most diverse texts confirm the crucial notion that the narrowest of cells does not, even metaphorically, represent an obstacle to the dynamics of escape. Nothing is more constant than the notion of freedom associated with the cell—freedom, as it were, from the imperatives of time and space. Poets repeatedly sing of this utopia and of this atemporality.

There were no stars, no earth, no time,

writes Byron—a line on which Tristan Corbière seems to play his own variation:

Plus de jours, plus de nuits.

What is involved, primarily, is the cult of liberty conceived in individualistic terms. “Die Freiheitsliebe ist eine Kerkerblume,” explains Heinrich Heine. And in Schiller's Die Raüber, not exactly the setting of a happy imprisonment, it is nonetheless in the darkness of the dungeon that the dream of freedom penetrates “wie ein Blitz in der Nacht.”

It is of course perfectly logical that the dynamics of escape—and this involves not just escape, but Romantic escapism—should affirm themselves within the context of captivity. Balzac evokes the art of these convicts who know how to conceive and execute masterful schemes. It is a proud sport, a challenge to the human potential of ingeniousness and perseverance. Nineteenth-century readers must have been particularly sensitive to Benvenuto Cellini's advice to his jailers to lock him up well (“guardatemi bene”) because he promised them that he would do all in his power to escape. Romanticism has of course its own virtuoso jail-breakers in the works of Stendhal, Dumas, and above all Victor Hugo, who describes with poetic relish the “muscle science” of convicts eternally envious of all that which flies (“Ces éternels envieux des mouches et des oiseaux”), and the “incredible art” of rising perpendicularly. Hugo indeed sees in the most mediocre man obsessed by the frightful thirst for liberty an inspired dreamer tending toward the sublime.⁹

A wide range of mediating and stereotyped images links the dream-prisoner to a transcending reality: walls as a symbolic boundary, windows, hills, clouds, birds—even water. The bird seems favored—perhaps because the image of the bird lends itself to a fundamental ambiguity. For the bird flies freely, but in its flight it also recalls the cage from which it flew away, the cage that awaits it, perhaps the cage it regrets. The exploitation of the image confirms the double movement inherent in the prison theme. If indeed the quest of spiritual freedom and the redemptive thrust carry toward an elsewhere, a reverse impulse tends toward the still center, toward another form of release, a deliverance from the causal world of phenomena. It is at this still center, this still point of the turning world, that is to be found the hidden secret, the ineffable treasure, the perception of the numen. It is, I believe, in this spirit that one must view Axel's castle in Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's weird play: the isolated castle in the midst of the dark forest, the dungeon atmosphere, and the funereal vaults—all are the warrants of a perfect fulfillment. For Sara and Axel, the protagonists of this spiritual drama, this fulfillment is intimately bound up with their ability to extract themselves from the “geôle du monde,” the worldly jail—that is, from the world of Becoming.

One could almost trace how, within the context of the prison theme, the dynamics of Romanticism can lead to the stasis of Decadentism. “Vivre?” says one of the characters in Axel, “les serviteurs feront cela pour nous” (to live—our servants will do that for us!). It is revealing that Huysmans, the author of A Rebours, that breviary of Decadentism, also invokes the penitentiary of worldly existence to justify his retirement into an inner exile. Nothing is in fact more characteristic of the mixture of decadentist and spiritualistically nostalgic literature than this inner exile, this contempt for action, this taste for an enclosed, nocturnal, artificial existence where rooms are furnished with ascetic elegance and hermetically sealed, where it is possible to surround oneself with silence, and to surrender to the selfish enjoyment of art as well as to a passive, vaguely onanistic eroticism seasoned by reveries of orgies and impotence. A Rebours proposes the comfortably heated cell—the “cellule tiède,” the “thébaïde raffinée,” a sophisticated hermit retreat, a privileged and self-chosen encagement in which the aesthete lives in fruitless comfort, surrounded by mirrors that reflect the image of his own haughty sterility. At the extreme point of this type of sensibility, the solipsistic prison ceases to have any tragic or lyric potential: it becomes the enervating enclosure for the self-centered hypochrondiac dilettante suffering from moral as well as physical dyspepsia. Very appropriately, when in his later work Huysmans begins to flirt with religion and toys with the idea of retiring to a monastery—but it must be a comfortable monastery!—he utilizes the expression “mettre son âme dans une pension.”

Of course, in a tragically and poetically endowed temperament, such as Proust's (who owes a great deal to Huysmans), the combination of decadentist sophistication and aesthetic hedonism can, as though in an ultimate metamorphosis, transform the inner space, the sound- and light-proof room, into the symbolic area of poetic experimentation and poetic insight. A study of such inner spaces in the work of Marcel Proust would surely yield rich results. The novel begins in bed, in the most intimate space of the most intimate room; it is written by a recluse in his bed, and that bed stands in a cork-lined room that shuts out all the voices of this world. If one recalls moreover the importance, in Proust's work, of the very notion of imprisoned essences that have to be liberated in order to overcome death—essences saved by the almost divine grace of memory providing the individual with his identity—it does become clear that what is involved is an intensely private kind of salvation. Proust has spoken beautifully of his early, intimate experiences, when reading in his darkened room as a boy, he uncovered from the inside of this darkness the “spectacle total de l'été,” and—even more dramatically—in a passage describing his childhood experience of sickness and reclusion: “I understood then that Noah was never able to see the world so clearly as from inside the ark, though it was locked and though there was darkness on the earth.”¹⁰

It would of course be tempting to conclude on this note of happy confinement, glorifying redemptive artistic creation. The image of the ark seems like a promise of survival. Yet one cannot deny that artistic redemption is viewed here essentially as a form of private salvation. All suffering is justified to the extent that it can be assimilated to private needs. It is probably not a coincidence that the poetic prestige of the prison image corresponds culturally to a period when the writer becomes increasingly his own favorite subject—indeed almost his unique subject: art becomes the subject of art, and thought the subject of thought, as the nineteenth-century writer indulges in a mirror disease at the cost of delicious self-torture. Baudelaire, poet of artificial paradises, speaks of that inner theater, of that limpid tête-à-tête with the self, of the ironic and self-destructive inventory of one's impotence, while enjoying this private tragedy in which the self (already viewed posthumously) appears as an inviolable actor. His dream is one of dandyish, aristocratic self-sufficiency: “Le vrai héros s'amuse tout seul.”¹¹

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry,” writes Thomas Mann. “But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”¹² I have already alluded to the decadent aberrations. What remains to be stressed is the fundamental gloom that hides behind the conquest of intimacy and images of self-possession. Behind the impregnable solitude and compulsive self-centeredness lurks the secret awareness that no relation can exist between man and man. There are no echoes to the cries of Sade's secret torture rooms—the cries cannot even be heard. And walls remain mute.

Of course, another story can be told; it also has deep roots in Romanticism, though it is our own period, alas, that was destined to experience it in the flesh. It is the story of collective imprisonment, whose historical and symbolic manifestations are the penal colony, the penitentiary. One recognizes, of course, the old tradition of the Dies Irae, of the purgatorial horrors, or worse, of a hopeless condemnation: “Lasciate ogni speranze voi ch'entrate.” Victor Hugo in Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné, describes a grimacing prison-humanity in a purgatorial atmosphere. As for Dostoevsky's House of the Dead, Turgenev was quite right in saying that the famous passage of the bath provides a truly Dantesque image. The fact is that both Dostoevsky and Hugo are convinced that private salvation is not possible; both glorify the criminal-convict for being other, that is for being a meditator; both view the convict with “sacred awe” as a kind of demonic and collective Redeemer. For both are deeply convinced that man as individual cannot save himself, that he is implicated in a collective drama.

This sense of a collective drama has been confirmed most bitterly by our own era of totalitarianism and concentration camps. The catastrophic nature of the twentieth century seems to have cancelled out the possibility of dreaming within the context of a poetic privacy. The nostalgia for this privacy remains strong no doubt, but it is also steadily denied. If Camus still writes about what he himself calls the “cellular lyricism” in The Stranger and The Fall, he also recognizes the oppression of History, and in The Plague proclaims that there can be no individual destiny, that there can only be a collective destiny. The original title of The Plague was Les Prisonniers—and it is characteristic that the modern prison turns out to be the entire city. Much could be said on this notion of the collective habitat, metropolis or megalopolis, as the modern figuration of a dehumanizing penitentiary. Nightmarish or futuristically utopian texts—many of them Russian—deal with this prophetic subject: Briussov, Zamiatin, Biely in the geometrically oneiric Saint Petersburg … I recall in particular Briussov's story, The Republic of Southern Cross, in which the chief city, Star City, with its windowless buildings, is covered by an “impenetrable and opaque roof,” a city that finally appears as an immense, black, polluted coffer. Whether in Briussov's, Zamiatin's, Orwell's, Walter Jens's, or Solzhenitsin's nightmare, the predominant feeling is that humanism and bourgeois culture, and even the concept of man, are doomed.

Finally, when the prison image has become so pervasive that the very notion of a prison-hermitage seems inconceivable, or at best an anachronistic revery, this seems to be evidence that individualism has become an impossible luxury. Stendhal, in the face of the increasing pressures and oppression of History, Ideologies, and anonymous, collective tyranny, could still believe that one can lock oneself out by locking oneself in—and thus protect a precious self-possession. Perhaps it is this that ultimately separates us most sharply from our Romantic heritage: the very dream of a happy prison has become hard to entertain in a world of penal colonies and extermination camps, in a world in which we may well fear that somehow even our suffering can no longer be our refuge.

Notes

1. Jean Genêt, Journal du voleur (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 272.

2. Alfred de Vigny, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade], 1948), II, 945.

3. Victor Hugo, “Pleurs dans la nuit,” Les Contemplations (Paris: Garnier, 1957), p. 253.

4. Victor Hugo, La Legende des siècles (Paris: Garnier, 1962), poem XLVII, p. 629.

5. Pierre Seghers, Piranese (Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1960), p. 33.

6. Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance générale, III (Paris: L. Conard, 1947-48), 39-40.

7. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (New York: Signet-New American Library, 1961), pp. 146-47.

8. Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l'espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), p. 79.

9. Cellini, Vita (Milano: Rizzoli, 1954), Bk. I, par. 108, p. 207. Hugo, Les Misérables (Paris: Garnier, 1957), I, 117, 548, 959; I, 178.

10. Marcel Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), I, 123; Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), p. 13.

11. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade], 1961), p. 1276.

12. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1958), p. 24.