Prison Life Writing, African American Narrative Strategies, and Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr

I know that the one writing it would only have to take words and fling them onto paper, the forbidden and accursed words, the bloody words, the words spit out in a lather, discharged with sperm, the slandered, reprobate words, the unwritten words—like the ultimate name of God—the dangerous, padlocked words, the words that don’t belong in the dictionary, because if they were written there, complete and not maimed by ellipses, they would say too quickly the suffocating misery of a solitude that is not accepted.

—Jean Genet (21)

In his introduction to George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1971), Jean Genet spends a great deal of time talking about the idea of bad language. He writes that the “forbidden and accursed words” that speak about prison life are “not accepted” outside of the prison in civil society. Genet insists that writing about prison is circumscribed by proscriptions and prescriptions that he represents as a kind of violence done to an already violent language: “[A]ny writing that reaches us from this infernal place should reach us as though mutilated, pruned of its overly tumultuous adornments” (21). For the “bloody words” of the prison to enter into the discourse of civil society, they have to be “maimed” and “mutilated,” “pruned” of their brutality and shocking immediacy.

Writing about Soledad Brother, an epistolary memoir, Genet specifically addresses prison life writing. As Genet suggests, prison life writing has rules about what kinds of speech and speaking subjects can enter into official (that is, published) autobiographical discourse. However, the rules of prison life writing can be difficult to identify because they are frequently tacit or implicit, de facto rather than de jure. Since the rules of prison life writing are often hard to spot, they are best recognized when broken or transgressed. Paul John Eakin identifies “three primary transgressions—there may be more—for which self-narrators have been called to account” (113) for contravening or transgressing the implicit or explicit regulations of autobiographical discourse: “(1) misrepresentation of biographical and historical truth, (2) infringement of the right to privacy, and (3) failure to display normative models of personhood” (113-14). Of the three rules that Eakin identifies here, the third—“failure to display normative models of personhood”—is instructive for understanding how Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr (1975) radically breaks the rules of prison life writing, particularly the genre’s tacit rules about representations of violence and crime. Prison writers who have committed acts of violence or engaged in criminal activity invariably seek to justify (or at least to explain) in their autobiographies the violence that they have perpetrated or the crimes that they have committed. James Carr, by comparison, describes murdering, raping, and brutalizing men and women inside and outside of the prison without justifying his violence. In fact, he resists providing any explanation for his crimes. By exploring Carr’s curious and often outlandish self-portrait of violent crime in Bad, this article will unearth the tacit rules of prison life writing and the African American autobiographical tradition and interrogate how working-class African American folkloric traditions engage a more mainstream, predominantly white reading public.

A scene early in Bad illustrates Carr’s approach to the genre of prison life writing. Carr describes how, when he was a boy, he stabbed another boy with a hunting knife and refused to provide the police with an explanation for the attack after he was caught: “They kept trying to discover some kind of motive. … I kept saying ‘I don’t know,’ while they kept thinking up possible reasons. It seemed like they were more nervous than I was thinking up new lines of questions” (24). Like Carr’s Bartleby-esque refusal to provide a motive for stabbing the boy, Bad provides no moral, ethical, political, or ideological explanation or justification for its author’s predatory violence. Instead, Carr boasts about his violent crimes.

While Carr’s boasting about violence places him at odds with prison life writing’s normative models of personhood, it does conform to a figure that appears...