Imagining the Penitentiary

THEORIZING THE ENLIGHTMENT 415 transgression, writing, and incest, and arrive at convincing conclusions concerning the relationship between desire and truth and their function in Sadian discourse. To quote the author's own summary: 'Sade'scontribution to the history and philosophy of thought lies in his having liberated desire from the ascendancy of truth by producing a discourse in which there is no truth without desire; in which the two are no longer separated, but are engaged in a free-playing relationship where they are both opposed and indissociable.' If there is one nagging doubt in the reader's mind at the end of this long discussion, it concerns, not the richness and coherence of Harari's analysis, but the justifiability of all the time and energy expended on a writer so literally marginal as Sade. Harari's final statement (with its revealing initial adverb) in fact stresses the gulf between Sade and the rest of humanity: 'Fortunately, the copious lucubrations that worked so well for him have still to affect his readers' imaginaries.' In chapter 7, Harari moves into the modern era to show the relationship between an imaginary scenario and the formulation (or revision) of theory in the cases of Freud and Levi-Strauss. To explain Freud's abandoning of the seduction theory in favour of the Oedipal theory, Harari analyses a dream which Freud had immediately after his father's funeral, and finds in it the scenario whereby Freud sought to suppress the father's culpability for having abandoned his second wife, Rebecca, and to take the responsibility of guilt onto himself (the son). Thus, 'psychoanalytical theory is not the founding act and departure for analysis; instead, the theory is first and foremost a symptom ... of the fantasy of a single individual: Freud.' Finally, in a brief but masterly section, Harari reads the 'Apotheosis of Augustus' section of Tristes Tropiques as the psychodrama scenario which enabled Levi-Strauss 'to dispose of any ethnographic knowledge that would be troublesome for the abstract systematizations' which underlie structuralist anthropology . Nowhere in this lucid and valuable book is theory's evacuation of the real more ruthlessly or more disturbingly exposed. Imagining the Penitentiary DAVID BLEWETT John Bender. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England University of Chicago Press 1987. xviii, 337. us $29.95 In his clever reformulation of the connection between social change and literature John Bender reverses the conventional notion that the prison scenes of eighteenth-century literature reflect (or satirize) reality and boldly argues that attitudes to imprisonment, and hence to prison architecture and the lives of priso~ers, are shaped by ideas that can be traced most clearly in the novel. 'Novels,' he tells us on the first page, are 'the vehicles, not the reflections, of social 416 DAVID BLEWETT change.' And they are so in ways more profound than has been suspected. The new penitentiaries, which, after the Penitentiary Act of 1779, began to displace the older prisons (in theory, if not always in practice, as readers of Dickens will recall), were meant to record - like novels - instances of character reformation. The penitentiary and the novel are 'comparable social texts,' realistic narratives of the essentially solitary process by which moral improvement is brought about, personality reshaped. Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, 'locked up by the bars and bolts of the ocean,' is the paradigm for the modern reformative experiment in behaviour modification of the penitentiary - and, though the analogy is not extended this far, the psychiatric ward. Bender grounds his mythology of reform on the 'impetus towards realism' in eighteenth-century philosophy and fiction. The empirical impulse has been detected before in the fine observation, detailed record-keeping, and sensory awareness of eighteenth-century English fiction, but no one has previously noticed the resemblance between the novel's handling of the fiction of the self (which is real, aware, knowable, worthwhile, and hence redeemable) and the penitentiary's employment of confinement, solitude, and routine as a means of inducing reformation, that is, redemption of character through a greater awareness of self. What this kind of discordia concors discovers in things apparently unlike is sequentiality; the penitentiary is 'conceived narratively on...