Brodsky
Joseph, “The Writer in Prison”, New York
Times, 13/10/1996
Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel
Prize-winning poet, died last January. This essay is drawn from his foreword to
''This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers,'' edited
by Siobhan Dowd and to be published by Cassell later this month.
Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time;
to an inmate, both are palpable. Naturally enough, this ratio -- echoing man's
situation in the universe -- is what has made incarceration an integral
metaphor of Christian metaphysics as well as practically the midwife of
literature. As regards literature, this stands, in a certain sense, to reason,
since literature is in the first place a translation of metaphysical truths
into any given vernacular.
Such translation can be attained of course even without incarceration, and
perhaps with greater accuracy. From Paul onward, however, the Christian
tradition has been relying with remarkable consistency on incarceration as a
means of revelatory transportation. Now cultures and literatures based on other
creeds and principles (if that is the word) than Christianity are doing their
utmost to catch up with their great senior -- or, in the case of the Chinese,
junior -- hoping no doubt to generate in the process their own Villons and
Dostoyevskys.
In the 20th
century imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory. You can
hardly name a language, not to mention a country (Norway, perhaps?), whose
writers are fully exempted from the trend. Some languages and countries have
fared better, of course; others worse. Russia seems to have bested them all,
but then, as the U.S.S.R., it was a very populous empire. With its demise, the
center of this problem's gravity has shifted out of Europe, to the far eastern
and southern reaches of Asia, to Africa, to the archipelagoes of the South
Pacific. Which is not such good news, either, since those, too, are extremely
populous regions. In its refusal to discriminate, geography seems to be eager
to catch up with history.
Or perhaps it's history catching up with
geography. By and large a writer finds himself behind bars for taking sides in
the political argument that is a sure sign of history. (The absence of such
argument of course is the chief characteristic of geography.) He may even try
to comfort himself with this interpretation of his predicament, which by now
has acquired the aspect of a noble tradition. However, this interpretation
won't last him long in the cell, being too broad for his comfort -- or, more
accurately, for his discomfort. No matter what historical bell a prison may
ring, it always wakes you up -- usually at 6 in the morning -- to the
unpalatable reality of your own term.
It's not
that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares
them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a
translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the
compact terms of your daily deportment. The most effective place for that is of
course solitary, with its reduction of the entire human universe to a concrete
rectangle permanently lit by the 60-watt luminary of its bulb. Under which you
revolve in pursuit of your sanity. After a couple of months of that, the solar
system is compromised thoroughly -- unlike, it is to be hoped, your friends and
close associates -- and if you are a poet, you may end up with a few decent
lyrics under your belt. As pen and paper are seldom available to a prisoner.
So you are
best off with rhyme and meter: to make the stuff memorable, especially in view
of some interrogation methods that render your occiput frequently unreliable.
On the whole, poets fare better in solitary than fiction writers because their
dependence on professional tools is marginal, since one's recurrent
back-and-forth movements under that electric luminary by themselves force the
lyric's eventual comeback no matter what. Also, because a lyric is essentially
plotless and, unlike the case against you, evolves according to the immanent
logic of linguistic harmony.
In fact,
writing -- more exactly, composing in your head -- formal poetry may be
recommended in solitary confinement as a kind of therapy, alongside pushups and
cold ablutions. In a shared cell, matters are somewhat different, and by and
large a fiction writer fares better than a poet. Prose is admittedly an art
rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common
denominator with his cell mates than a poet is. Being a storyteller, he is
curious almost by definition, and this helps him to establish rapport with his
fellow prisoners by inquiring about their cases and circumstances as well as by
treating them to his own or other authors' plots. All along he may be fancying
himself gathering material for his future work, or perceived as such by his
cell mates, who are only too glad to bestow upon him their own, very often
deliberately ornate, accounts of their lives.
The bulk of
prisoners' writings clearly favors prose. This is not because fiction writers
are incarcerated more often than poets (in fact, the reverse seems to be the
case). This is above all because poetry finds the monotonous idiom of penal
certitude plainly hostile to the abrupt nature of verse. It's not that the art
of poetry refuses to honor the base reality of oppression with the flowers of
eloquence, although one could put it this way. It's just that the essence of
any good lyric is compression and velocity. This is so much so that even when a
poet resolves to record his penal experience, he as a rule resorts to prose. A
poem about prison is harder to come by -- even in modern Russian literature --
than a novel about it, let alone memoirs. Perhaps poetry is the least mimetic
of all arts.
If it isn't,
then the subject of its mimesis is clearly beyond and above prison walls
bristling with barbed wire, guards, machine guns, etc. All art aspires to the
condition of music, said Walter Pater, and poetry, for one, apparently refuses
to get mesmerized by human suffering, including that of its very practitioners.
The natural inference is that there are matters more absorbing than the frailty
of one's body or agony of one's soul. This inference, made by both the public
and its watchdogs, makes poetry and, with it, all the arts dangerous. To put it
differently, art's unwitting byproduct is the notion that the overall human
potential is far greater than can be exercised, not to mention catered to, by
any given social context. In certain circles, this news is unwelcome, and the
wider these circles are the more willingly they tend to square a writer.
Now, a
writer is certainly not a sacred cow: he can't be above the law or, for that
matter, the lawlessness of his society. A prison or a concentration camp is
that society's extension, not foreign territory, although your diet there alone
may suggest that much. By finding himself behind bars, a writer just continues
to share in his people's predicament. Neither in their eyes nor, one should
hope, in his own is he any different from them. There is in fact a certain
element of dishonesty in trying to spring a writer from a prison filled up with
his compatriots -- with his, as it were, readers and subjects. It's like
throwing a single life vest into an overcrowded boat sinking in the sea of
injustice.
Yet thrown
this life vest must be, because it's better to save one than nobody, and also
because, once saved, this one can send a more powerful S O S signal than anyone
else in that sinking boat. Although there are plenty of books on our shelves we
won't ever touch, a life vest should be thrown to a writer for the simple
reason that he might produce yet another book. The more books sitting on our
shelves, the fewer men we put in prisons. Of course by getting a writer --
especially a poet -- out of jail, society perhaps shortchanges itself some
metaphysical breakthrough, but the bulk of its members would readily trade that
for the banality of their relative security, no matter in what way the
metaphysical truths are obtained. In short, the time spent reading a book is
time stolen from acting; and in a world settled as thickly as ours the less we
act the better.
Prison
writings are about suffering and endurance. As such, they are of great prurient
interest to the general public, which is blissfully still in the position of
perceiving incarceration as an anomaly. It is in order to make this perception
survive in the world to come that these writings should be read. For there is
nothing more tempting than to succumb to viewing the incarceration of people as
the norm. As there is nothing easier than perceiving -- and indeed obtaining --
spiritual benefits from the experience of incarceration itself.
Man is in
the habit of detecting a higher purpose and meaning in manifestly meaningless
reality. He has a tendency to treat the hand of authority as an instrument,
albeit blunt, of Providence. An overall sense of guilt and delayed comeuppance
conspire in this attitude, making him easy prey, while all along he prides
himself on attaining new depths of humility. This is an old story, as old as
the history of oppression itself, which is to say as old as the history of
submission.
But what may
be an ascent for a pilgrim is a slippery slope for a society. The world to come
is bound to be more crowded than this one, and even an anomaly there will take
on epidemic proportions. There are no penicillins here; the only possible
remedy is the home-made, totally individualistic, idiosyncratic deportment of
the potential victim. For writers above all, and in spite of their convictions
or physical frames, are individualists. They don't get along with one another;
their gifts and stylistic devices differ greatly; they are also guiltier than
most people, because they are the first for whom repetition compromises words.
In other words, a writer is himself a superb metaphor of the human condition.
Therefore what he's got to say about imprisonment should be of great interest
to those who fancy themselves free.
Ultimately
what he says may help to dispel some of the prison mystique. In the popular
mind, prison is the unknown and thus enjoys a close proximity to death, which
is the ultimate in the unknown and in the deprivation of freedom. Initially at
least, solitary can be compared to a coffin without much hesitation. Allusions
to the nether world in a discourse on prisons are commonplace in any vernacular
-- unless such discourse is simply taboo. For from the vantage of a standard
human reality, prison is indeed an afterlife, structured as intricately and
implacably as any ecclesiastical version of the kingdom of death, and by and
large rich in gray hues.
However, a
partial deprivation of freedom -- which is what a prison is -- is worse than
the absolute one, since the latter cancels your ability to register this
deprivation. Also, because in prison you are not at the mercy of some
unpalpable demons; you are in the hands of your own kind, whose tactility is
excessive. It's quite possible that the bulk of nether world imagery in our
culture derives precisely from the penal experience.
In any case,
prison writing shows you that hell is both man-made and manned by man. Herein
lies your prospect for enduring it, since men, cruel as they are paid to be,
are negligent, corruptible, lazy and so forth. No man-made system is perfect,
and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to
cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term. In other
words, there is no point in tempering your convictions this side of the prison
wall, because you might find yourself behind it. By and large, prisons are
survivable. Though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a
lump of sugar would be more useful.