Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons

Front matter

Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons

The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment

Ring p xz x . a 4 re" f 4 “ys y a 3 ŃŚ pE x ae fa

PART THREE In Slime and Darkness: The Metaphor of Filth in IIQ Criminal Justice

Prologue to Part Three I2I 10. Eject Him Tainted Now: 123 The Criminal As Filth in Western Culture 11. Projecting an Excrementitious Mass: 147 The Metaphor of Filth in the History of Botany Bay 12. Stirring the Odorous Pile: Vicissitudes of the 171 Metaphor in Britain and the United States Conclusion to Part Three: Metaphor Understood 185 CONCLUSION The Romanticization of Criminals and the 188

Defense against Despair

Appendix 195 Notes 197 Bibliography 243

Index 263

Preface and Acknowledgments

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. —Shakespeare

This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns—about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds. The book portrays law-abiding citizens who harbor a “strange liking” for criminal deeds, and criminals who find an “extraordinary beauty” in their prison yards. ‘Thus, the book describes a nonutopian world in which criminals and noncriminals—while injuring each other in ways plain for all to see—nonetheless live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, living for as well as off each other, enriching each other’s lives in profound and surprising ways.

This book has its roots in my doctoral training in the Political Science Department of Columbia University. There, in the 1970s, I became fascinated by individuals and groups who reject the legitimacy of the state and oppose its right to govern their lives. In papers with such titles as “Consciousness versus Spontaneity” and “Utopian Fury,” I explored the socioeconomic and political matrices of Spanish anarchism, Brazilian peasant movements, and the Colombian “violencia.” Throughout these endeavors, I benefited from the wise counsel of four scholars: Professors Douglas Chalmers, Mark Kesselman, Arnold Rogow, and Allan Silver.

During my years in graduate school, my interest gradually shifted from the objective conditions fostering radical and revolutionary movements to the idiosyncratic meanings of the movements for the participants themselves. In my search for better tools to investigate these subjective meanings, I decided, upon completion of my doctorate, to seek training as a research candix Preface and Acknowledgments date at the Psychoanalytic Institute at the State University of New York, Downstate School of Medicine (now the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center). ‘Through a training analysis, classes, and clinical experience, I studied the complex vicissitudes of the human mind and the genesis of mental associations in childhood. From the beginning of my psychoanalytic training until the present time, I have received sustaining encouragement from the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute. I especially wish to thank my advisers, Drs. Marvin Nierenberg and Martin Silverman, and the former director of the Institute, Dr. Austin Silber.

In the fall of 1980, my ongoing preoccupation with issues centering on authority and interpretation led me to matriculate as a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. Not surprisingly, I soon found myself drawn to Criminal Law as the arena where the state and the individual confront each other in the most dramatic fashion. It was my good fortune to study Criminal Law with Professor Abraham Goldstein, who fostered wonderful class discussions ranging far beyond the elements of crimes. Professor (now Dean) Anthony Kronman encouraged me to bring my previous training to bear on the law and gave generously of his time to help me obtain a position as a law professor.

In addition to these long-term intellectual debts, I am obligated in more immediate ways to the Emory University School of Law and its Dean, Howard O. Hunter, for summer research grants and a sabbatical leave to work on this project. I am also grateful to the following colleagues at Emory University, who took time from their own work to comment on previous drafts of this book: Professors David Bederman, Harriet King, Andrew Kull, Marc Miller, John Sitter, Gary Smith, and John Witte, Jr. I owe a word of special appreciation to Professors Thomas Arthur and Colleen Murphy, who not only read early drafts, but also served as my first audience for many of the ideas and much of the language in the book. My gratitude goes as well to Professor Sheridan Baker; the Reverend Richard Duncan; Professor Michael Hoffheimer; Professor James Kincaid; Richard Levin, Esquire; Professor Nor-

Preface and Acknowledgments xi val Morris; Dr. Ralph Roughton; C. G. Schoenfeld, Esquire; Professor J. Allen Smith; and Professor Walter O. Weyrauch—all of whom gave me the benefit of their thoughtful criticism.

Professors James Boyd White and Howard Kushner extended themselves far beyond the call of duty to help me find a suitable publisher; I am extremely grateful for their efforts. My secretaries, Radine Robinson and Rosalind Wiggins, took an active interest in the substance of the book while typing draft after draft with patience and good humor. The staff of the Emory Law Library provided indispensable research support.

I owe my greatest debt to my late friend and colleague, Donald W. Fyr. His overflowing love of books and ideas gladdened many an hour; his belief in me and my project helped to keep me on a steady course.

Introduction

This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. — Shakespeare

While Morton Sobell was serving a thirty-year prison sentence as a co-conspirator of the Rosenbergs, his wife, Helen, observed that the two of them were actually happier than many couples living in freedom. Sobell agreed, but cautioned his wife against expressing such an idea to others, lest it be misunderstood. People, he thought, “would say we were nuts, or even worse. Anyway, happi- - ness is never as easy to explain as unhappiness.” !

Recognizing that his and his wife’s response to his imprisonment was paradoxical, Sobell feared that other people would reject their experience as invalid—a theme we see again in Erica Wallach’s prison memoir, Light at Midnight. Describing the five years she served in Soviet camps and prisons, Wallach wrote that the great beauty of the Siberian landscape often awed her and her fellow prisoners; at times, they could not help stopping their work to admire the scenery. Yet, she reflected, “we did not dare admit it openly to each other: how could we possibly enjoy anything in the inferno!” Instead, they kept telling each other how much they would have admired the majestic views if they had gone there as tourists.”

In these vignettes, a complex, differentiated reality defeats the stereotyped expectation that penal confinement will prove an unequivocal evil. For certain positive aspects of experience —among them, love and beauty—the dichotomy of confinement and freedom is simply irrelevant. Yet, if Sobell’s and Wallach’s experiences strike us as paradoxical, still more deeply so are situations where the prisoner’s happiness is not merely unaffected, but actually

2 Introduction enhanced, by incarceration. In such cases, prison, because of its symbolic resonance, may come to stand for a nurturing mother or a matrix of spiritual rebirth. Here we see clearly the truth of Northrop Frye’s remark: “Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously.” ?

This book will endeavor to explore two adjoining regions of this unconscious mythological universe: (1) positive images of penal confinement, and (2) romantic visions of criminals and their illegal deeds. ‘Thus far, I have touched on only the first of these regions, but the second, likewise, is rich in paradox, inner conflict, and reluctant admission of painful truths. Consider, for example, the following passage from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy. Here, Nicol Jarvie, a prudent Scots businessman, muses over his attraction to a violent outlaw who extorts fees from his countrymen in exchange for protection:

It’s a queer thing o’ me, gentlemen, that am a man o’ peace mysell, and a peacefw’ man’s son, for the deacon my father quarrelled wi’ nane out o’ the town-council—it’s a queer thing I say, but I think the Hieland blude o’ me warms at thae daft tales [of Rob Roy], and whiles I like better to hear them than a word o’ profit, Gude forgie me! But they are vanities—sinfu’ vanities, and moreover, again the statute law—again the statute and gospel law.*

Honestly acknowledging that Rob’s criminal adventures appeal to him more than “a word o’ profit,” Jarvie recognizes that this fascination is surprising in someone of his character. At the end of his statement, he endeavors to appease his inner moral voice by roundly condemning Rob’s acts.

A book such as this one, which seeks to examine the labyrinthine chains of meanings that we associate with crime and punishment, cries out for an interdisciplinary approach. Specifically, it demands a source that can reveal our unconscious as well as our conscious associations. Such a source is literature. With its allusiveness, its internal cross-references, and its richness of metaphor and symbol, literature is especially well-suited to convey

Introduction 3 unconscious meaning. Therefore, throughout this book, I employ literary classics, supplemented by prison memoirs, films, and legal history, to demonstrate the paradoxical symbiotic relationship between criminals and law-abiding people. My approach to these texts is informed by psychoanalytic theory. I thus take for granted such basic psychoanalytic tenets as the existence of the unconscious, the meaningfulness of all mental manifestations, and the profound causal significance of early life.

This book is divided into three distinct, yet closely related, parts. Part One, “Cradled on the Sea: Positive Images of Prison and Theories of Punishment,” seeks to show that alongside the negative vision of prison as a living hell, an island of the damned, or a place where men rot under their rocks and yearn for freedom, many prisoners and nonprisoners exhibit powerful positive associations to incarceration. In particular, I will present evidence to suggest that prison is viewed as a refuge from life’s trivia, a “cradle on the sea,” an academy, and a place where time stands still. Besides setting forth the affirmative images of prison, I endeavor to explain them. The sources discussed range from psychological processes (such as institutional transference and oral fixation), to cultural archetypes (such as the dialectically related polarities of death and rebirth, suffering and redemption), to sociopolitical factors (such as the actual negative aspects of life in freedom). At the end of Part One, I draw implications from the positive meanings of confinement for the classical theories of punishment: retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

Part Two, “A Strange Liking: Our Admiration for Criminals,” makes a shift from lawbreakers looking at punishment to law-abiding people looking at criminals. Drawing on criminal-noncriminal dyads in such works as The Grapes of Wrath, Heart of Darkness, and Les Miserables, I examine the paradox of our wondering esteem for those who break the law. I begin by showing both the pervasiveness of admiration for criminals and the simultaneous resistance to that admiration. Inner division is painful; therefore, noncriminals develop strategies for minimizing this mental conflict. One such strategy is what I call “Rationalized Admiration:

4 Introduction

Overt Delight in the Camouflaged Criminal.” Noncriminals adopting this approach openly admire criminals but believe that they do so because of the lawbreakers’ virtues—for example, their embodiment of justice (Robin Hood, Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath); freedom (Carmen, Moll Flanders); greatness (Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment); or glamor (Alan Breck in Kidnapped, Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby).

The second strategy for coping with the inner conflict over criminals is repression. By this mechanism, noncriminals energetically bar from consciousness their admiration for criminals, thereby alleviating their guilt. Often, these noncriminals replace their buried esteem for lawbreakers with conscious loathing and repudiation. ‘To illustrate this dynamic, I analyze the travelers’ rejection of the prostitute in de Maupassant’s story “Ball-of-Fat” and Pip’s disgust for Magwitch in Great Expectations.

In defending against their admiration for criminals, some noncriminals go beyond disgust and loathing to persecution—a stance that enables them to associate with criminals and even imitate their ways while maintaining an inner conviction that they are upholding the law. To portray this vicissitude, I draw on the villagers’ treatment of Christy in Synge’s drama The Playboy of the Western World and Javert’s shifting attitudes toward Jean Valjean in Hugo’s Les Miserables.

Part Three, “In Slime and Darkness: The Metaphor of Filth in Criminal Justice,” builds on the foundation laid in Part Two, in particular, the discussion of loathing, disgust, and repudiation as vicissitudes of admiration for criminals. At the outset, I trace the association between slime and criminality in such works as Macbeth, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Jamaica Inn. In the course of this analysis, I adduce psychoanalytic theory and child observations to demonstrate that soft, wet dirt is as deeply attractive to us as it is repulsive. I suggest that slime’s unconscious and forbidden allure helps to explain its popularity as a metaphor for criminals.

Criminals are seen not only as slimy, but as ineradicably slimy. For this reason, they are viewed as worthless objects that may be thrown away. Thus, the static metaphor of the criminal as slime

Introduction 5 leads to a dynamic allegory in which criminals commit a bad act, become indelibly stained, and are cast out. This allegory found a resonance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, when the British government elected to solve its penal crisis by banishing hundreds of thousands of criminals to Australia. The history of Australia is replete with descriptions of convicts as “sewage” and their island-prison as a “dunghill,” a “cesspool,” and a “sink of wickedness.” In even more graphic terms, Jeremy Bentham described the policy of transporting criminals to Australia as projecting an “excrementitious mass.” Notwithstanding the richness of these expressions, it was not for its language that I elected to analyze the Botany Bay experiment, but because this episode represents a remarkable effort by noncriminals—an effort to eliminate the very relationship with criminals, to repudiate convicts utterly and treat them as if they were on another planet, or a distant star.

Ironically, the Australian penal colony soon acquired a positive significance as a new promised land where criminals could rebuild their lives. It was not only a place East of Eden to which they were banished, but also a new Jerusalem to which they came. Thus, this “prison of infinite space,” like the traditional prisons and penitentiaries depicted in “Cradled on the Sea,” became, in the eyes of some convicts, a beloved prison. Much later, idealization also replaced contempt with regard to the original transported convicts, the First Fleeters; today, they are seen as romantic outlaws. And so we come full circle.

In the book’s Conclusion, I suggest that the prisoners’ exalted conception of their prison and the noncriminals’ glamorous vision of lawbreakers are both manifestations of a romantic yearning. Specifically, these portrayals reflect a desire to escape from the mundane world-as-it-is into a nobler and more meaningful time and place. Such romanticism serves to defend against the narcissistic wound of our relative puniness and mortality.

PART ONE Cradled on the Sea: Positive Images of Prison and

Theories of Punishment

My good, my gentle friend, my cell! My sweet retreat, mine alone, I love you so! If I had to live in all freedom in another city, I would first go to prison to acknowledge my own, those of my race.

—Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

CHAPTER I A Thousand Leagues Above: Prison As a Refuge from the Prosaic

By “world” I mean the whole complex of incidents, demands, compulsions, solicitations, of every kind and degree of urgency, ... which overtake the mind without offering it any inner illumination.

—Paul Valéry

Toward the end of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel The Cancer Ward, Oleg Kostoglotov is released from the hospital where he has been confined and goes to buy a shirt in a department store. While looking over the shirts, he hears a man ask the clerk, “Do you have a size twenty-five shirt like this one, with a size fifteen collar?” Oleg reacts with horror and righteous indignation to the small-mindedness that he feels this question reflects:

It staggered Oleg like an electric shock. He turned in amazement and looked at this clean-shaven, smooth man in the good felt hat, wearing a white shirt and tie, stared at him as though the man had struck him.

Men had endured the agony of the trenches, bodies had been heaped in mass graves, others had been buried in shallow pits in the icy Arctic, people had been arrested time and again and sent to camps, they had frozen in barred railroad cars, men had broken their backs working with pick and shovel to earn the price of a tattered padded jacket, and this sniveling fop remembered not only his shirt size, but his collar size?

This last fact shattered Oleg. He could not have imagined that a collar had its own separate size. Suppressing a groan, he turned his back on the shirt counter. A collar size, no less! Why such a refined life? Why return to this life? If you had to remember your collar size, you'd have to forget something. Something more important!’

IO A Thousand Leagues Above

The cancer ward as depicted by Solzhenitsyn is not, of course, a prison, but it resembles one in important respects. Solzhenitsyn himself calls attention to the parallel, for he describes Oleg as thinking: “Emerging from these hospital gates—how did this differ from emerging from prison?”?

The incident of the collar size illustrates the former captive’s rejection of the trivial preoccupations that he finds in freedom. We see a similar reaction in a book by a very different kind of prisoner: an American who spent more than thirteen years in a Florida state penitentiary for breaking and entering, petit larceny, and burglary. During an interval of freedom, James Blake writes to a friend:

Another kind of nostalgia Pve been fighting is the Brotherhood- Of-The-Doomed feeling I had in the penitentiary and no longer have, with nothing to put in its place. I’ve been trying hard to isolate and name this virus, and think I have. Thing is, it’s better than many things the world of electric toothbrushes bas given me.°

In an earlier letter, written inside prison, he attempts to explain what attracts him to a life of confinement. Again, the words resonate with those of Oleg Kostoglotov: “Life has indeed been reduced to its simplest terms, a state of affairs not completely unpleasant. So many of the trimmings that go with life outside have often been merely confusing to me. The food here is simple but entirely adequate, as are the pleasures.” * Blake’s words suggest a parallel between the allure of imprisonment and that of monastic life—a point that others have made explicitly.°

In a letter written just after returning to prison for another crime, Blake elaborates his vision of life outside prison as meaningless, frenetic activity:

Your concern over my welfare is indeed gratifying, . . . but the basic misconception of most civilians about convicts is that they suffer, when actually they are comparatively blithe and carefree. Certainly they’re not as harried as the gnomes I see on New York streets, scuttling and scurrying into subways like apprehensive White Rabbits.°

By contrast with this negative image of life in freedom, Blake names prison with a symbol of the eternal: “I’m still trying to

A Thousand Leagues Above II make it here and resisting the awful temptation to go back to the peace and quiet of the Rock.” 7

The image of prison as an island of calm amidst the hurly-burly also appears in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Here too we see a variation on this theme: prison as a place of endurance amidst ephemerae. Toward the end of the play, just after Lear and Cordelia are reunited, Cordelia asks: “Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?” Lear’s reply constitutes one of the loveliest carceral fantasies in literature. It suggests that he, who has been greatly troubled by possessions, and who suffers from guilt over his treatment of his youngest daughter, can look forward with rapture to an austere existence.

No, no, no, no! Come let’s away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds i’th cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, PI kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too— Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out— And take upon ’s the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies: and we'll wear out,

In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by’th moon.®

The prisoners are still and endure, while those in freedom come and go.

Like James Blake and Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn imagines prison as a calm place in the midst of motion. In The First Circle, he depicts the sharashka (a special prison for intellectuals) as an ark resting on the water. He suggests that by virtue of their seclusion and relative stillness, the prisoners enjoy a truer perspective on life than they could attain from the outside world, which is rushing by: “From here, from the ark, . . . the whole tortuous flow of accursed history could easily be surveyed, as if from an enormous height, and yet at the same time one could see every detail, every pebble on the river bed, as if one were immersed in the stream.” ”

I2 A Thousand Leagues Above

Elaborating on his metaphor, Solzhenitsyn conceives of the prisoners as floating on the river, hence “weightless” in that they are free of prosaic concerns:

Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satiated. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for their children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony.'°

Whereas this excerpt depicts prison as a calm but passionless abode, elsewhere Solzhenitsyn portrays prison as the place where one can engage life at its most profound level. In the following passage he describes the thoughts of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin on the occasion of his wife’s visit to the prison:

Seen from the outside [his life] appeared an unhappy one, but Nerzhin was secretly happy in that unhappiness. He drank it down like spring water. Here he got to know people and events about which he could learn nowhere else on earth, certainly not in the quiet, well-fed seclusion of the domestic hearth. From his youth on,

Gleb Nerzhin had dreaded more than anything else wallowing in daily living. As the proverb says, “It’s not the sea that drowns you, it’s the puddle.” !!

The broadening experience of imprisonment is contrasted with the narrow “seclusion of the domestic hearth,” with wallowing in the quotidian, with drowning in a puddle.

In addition to the symbol of calm amidst motion, another image used to express the theme of prison as a refuge from the prosaic is that of a high place. ‘Thus, in Stendhal’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma, the prison is constructed so far above the ground that Fabrizio refers to “this airy solitude.” !* On the first night of his incarceration, Fabrizio spends hours at the window, “admiring this horizon which spoke to his soul.” In prison, he finds the happiness that had eluded him in freedom: “By a paradox to which he gave no thought, a secret joy was reigning in the depths of his heart.”'* Endeavoring to account for this paradox, Fabrizio reflects: “[H]ere one is a thousand leagues above the pettinesses and wickednesses which occupy us down there.” !°

We see the same theme of prison as a cloister in Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of the meek Baptist, Alyoshka, in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. When the protagonist, Shukhov, tells him that prayer is ineffectual, since it cannot shorten one’s sentence, Alyoshka remonstrates: “ “You mustn’t pray for that.’ Alyoshka was horror-struck. ‘What d’you want your freedom for? What faith you have left will be choked in thorns. Rejoice that you are in prison. Here you can think of your soul.’ ” © Shukhov reflects: “Alyoshka was talking the truth. You could tell by his voice and his eyes he was glad to be in prison.” !”

A variation on the theme of prison as a refuge from the commonplace appears in Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, which concerns a Mexican priest imprisoned during a period of religious persecution. The following passage occurs following the priest’s release from prison, while he is hearing confessions in relative safety:

The old woman prattled on and on, . . . prattled of abstinence days broken, of evening prayers curtailed. Suddenly, without warning, with an odd sense of homesickness, he thought of the hostages in the prison yard, waiting at the water-tap, not looking at him—the suffering and the endurance which went on everywhere the other side of the mountains. He interrupted the woman savagely, “Why don’t you confess properly to me? I’m not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night . . . remember your real sins.” '®

Here we see the priest’s nostalgia for prison as a place where serious things happen, where people suffer and acknowledge grave sins. To the trivial preoccupations of his civilian penitent, he opposes prison as an embodiment of what is “real.”

I have said that prison is often pictured as a refuge from the trivial or prosaic. But what is it a refuge for? Two principal themes emerge from the literature: prison as the quintessential academy and prison as a catalyst of intense friendship. The image of prison as an academy appears in Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle.

Early in the book, Gleb Nerzhin elaborates on the ways that prison has developed his understanding of life. He says that as a free man he read books on the meaning of life or the nature of happiness but understood those works only superficially. “Thank God for prison!” he exclaims. “It gave me the chance to think.” 1°

Nerzhin goes on to tell a fellow prisoner that an understanding of happiness comes from recognizing that it does not depend on external blessings: “Remember that thin, watery barley or the oatmeal porridge without a single drop of fat? Can you say that you eat it? No. You commune with it, you take it like a sacrament. ... [I]t spreads through your body like nectar. ... Can you really compare the crude devouring of a steak with this?”?° Compare the similar insight that Tolstoy attributes to Pierre in War and Peace: “While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.” %1

The black American prisoner Samuel Melville perceives what he has learned in prison in much the same light:

for the first time since i was a small boy i have no money and no keys in my pockets. you can’t imagine the rehabilitating effect of that! from the muslims i am learning to fast and control my own body. from reading thoreau and some of the eastern teachings i can live on much less than even prison allows .... and i am tripping all the time. not with the frenzy of acid but with the confidence of my liberation from superficialities.”?

Whereas these prisoners regard prison as a place where they have gained wisdom, Malcolm X portrays his confinement as a catalyst of learning in a more concrete sense. In a chapter of his autobiography entitled “Saved,” he describes how he taught himself to read with understanding while in prison and how this ability opened up a new world to him. He believes that prison enabled him to study more intensively than would have been possible in college, where there are “too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.”

He asks: “Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?”

Malcolm X views prison as a catalyst of learning in that it provides an environment free from worldly concerns. Other prisoners have pictured prison as a matrix of intense friendship because it forces prisoners to live together in isolation from the world. Thus, throughout The First Circle Solzhenitsyn contrasts the isolation and mistrust that characterize relationships among the civilians with the camaraderie and profound friendship that pervade the prisoners’ lives. In the following passage Solzhenitsyn describes friendship in the sharashka in the language of ecstasy:

In these Sunday evening hours solid matter and flesh no longer re-

minded people of their earthly existence. The spirit of male friend-

ship and philosophy filled the sail-like arches overhead.

Perhaps this was, indeed, that bliss which all the philosophers of antiquity tried in vain to define and teach to others.**

Solzhenitsyn is not alone in portraying prison friendships as unusually passionate. For example, Eugenia Ginzburg, imprisoned by Stalin for eighteen years, declares simply: “There are no more fervent friendships than those made in prison.”*? So too Vera Figner, confined by the tsars, writes that upon her release from prison she experienced despair at losing the people with whom she had spent twenty years “in close communion, under the most exceptional circumstances.” 76

Beyond describing the intensity of friendship in prison, many prisoners have attempted to explain why friendships tend to flourish under conditions of penal confinement more than in freedom. Figner and Solzhenitsyn cite the absence, in prison, of those relationships that tend to compete with friendship in the outside world. Thus, Figner explains that the “whole world was closed to [her], all human ties broken,” and her fellow prisoners substituted for “family and society, ... party, homeland, and all humanity.” 7” Incarceration imposes an isolation from the world, but those who share this isolation see themselves as forming relationships of an emotional power unequaled in the world outside. Solzhenitsyn theorizes in a similar vein: “Men with exceptional intellect, education, and experience, but too devoted to their families to have much of themselves left over for their friends, here belonged only to friends.” 7° He reiterates this point in a later scene: