Brodsky Joseph: The Writer in Prison

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.