Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (review)

Andrew Sobanet’s Jail Sentences provides a fascinating study of the prison novel in French fiction over the twentieth century. Focusing on selected novels by four authors, all of whom have experienced prison life to varying degrees and in varying roles, Sobanet probes the tensions and ambiguities traversing a body of writing which obliges the reader to speculate on the fraught relationship between referentiality and fictionality. In chapters devoted to the novels of Victor Serge, Jean Genet, Albertine Sarrazin and François Bon, Sobanet demonstrates how each author meshes testimonial and fictional techniques in a bid to heightening the effect of their writings as an ideological and/or critical exposé of incarceration and the French penitentiary system. He begins with Victor Serge’s Les Hommes dans la prison (1930), examining the documentary impulse of Serge’s narrative and its value as an ‘everyman’ account of incarceration. Yet, as Sobanet demonstrates, such interpretations must be put alongside readings that consider the avowed socio-political purpose of the text and its denunciation of power relations within the French prison system. In Genet’s Miracle de la rose (1946), Sobanet analyses the prison novel from a very different narrative perspective, that of Genet’s outcast narrator who embraces the role of pariah and flouts the rules of bourgeois society in a work that depicts prison as a site of homoerotic fantasy. In Sarrazin’s La Cavale (1965), the uneasy tension between life writing and textual representation is set within the frame of a novel that critiques the debilitating experience of prison on the individual prisoner. As Sobanet emphasizes, for Sarrazin, writing and her textual self-projection represent hope for the future and some respite from the slow degradation of imprisonment. Lastly, in François Bon’s Prison (1997), Sobanet explores the multi-faceted and morally charged project of a text which is the product of Bon’s own experiences as a director of a prison writing workshop. Weaving fictionalised monologues, material from the prison workshops themselves and the horror of the murder of a former student from the workshop, Bon’s hybrid text represents the marginalisation of juvenile prisoners whose life histories offer a searing indictment of the social injustices of contemporary France. Such in-depth textual analysis is, throughout the study, implicated in broader debates on the ways in which we interpret and respond to prison writings. How do authors and readers understand the truth value of such writings? How are fictionalising techniques used to manipulate what we take to be real-life experience? As Sobanet emphasises in his conclusion, ‘reality’ can be rearranged in a myriad of ways in prose fiction. By working to expose the narrative constructions upon which the prison novel is built, Sobanet highlights the often tangled web of truth, fiction and story-telling which is such a prominent feature of contemporary culture’s fascination with prison and its effects.