Dark Passengers

“Why?  Simply because I am interested in the past?  No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present.  Yes, if one means writing the history of the present.”

                This is a fitting quote to end the first chapter of Discipline & Punishment.  It ends the graphic nature of the first chapter with a look at the philosophical and practical desires of Foucault in this volume.  He frames his thoughts and writing, like many of his contemporaries, under the banner of New Criticism; or at least as we understand it from the definition given last week.  However, what does this utilization of New Criticism do to the thoughts pertained within his work? 

                One of the claims that Foucault makes within ‘the spectacle of the scaffold’ is that as the penal system grew and became more attuned to the system that we know today, the severity of punishment for religious crimes went down.  In other words, as we approached the model of the contemporary penal system, crimes religious in nature (blasphemy, adultery, etc.) were sentenced to more lenient punishments.  However, one question that is implicit in the text throughout the text is the idea of the soul as the prison of the body.  Foucault addresses the matter somewhat indirectly throughout the text, offering up ideas that the physical nature of body can be punished much more easily than the soul.  Readers are confronted by thick descriptions of the horrors that can come from the tortures executed upon the body, but he does not get into the dark recesses of the mind and soul until later in the book.  He states that the punishment upon the body was enough for strong men to wither and die when the proper amount of time and pain was induced upon the criminal, but this connection between soul as prison and Foucault’s analysis comes at a timely point in history. 

                Although we, as a species, have been interested in our criminals, both fiction and non-fiction, from Judas to Brutus, Bluebeard, Jack the Ripper, and Magneto.  They interest us and have been a source of dark entertainment for thousands of years.  However, within the past century that dark entertainment has moved from interest to a desire for real understanding not only of their crimes but also of their emotional, religious and mental states.  For instance, the classical example of Russian Realism follows a fictional murderer, Raskolnikov, as he deals with his crime mentally and wrestles constantly with his soul.  Although though this was a work of fiction, Dostoyevsky is able to weave a complicated and engrossing narrative of a man soulfully dealing with his own choices and how those choices begin to destroy him.  No punishment that the court could levy on Raskolnikov would be worse than the guilt his soul feels as he struggles with his crime. 

                In the 20^th century, we are presented with multiple instances where we are entranced and addicted to the criminal’s plight against his own soul.  In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song are the first, and probably best, examples that come to mind.  Each work presents their criminals not only as a man, something that seems to be lacking in earlier versions of our society, but also as soulful victims of their own pitiless existence.  They are men who feel for their victims and are more distraught by their crimes than anyone else, a characteristic that is somewhat absent in the mythos of the criminal before this era.  Perry, one of two killers from In Cold Blood, is seen as an artist, a tortured soul.  He is the quintessential criminal as a tortured soul.  He is saddened by his actions and his soul is therefore more of a prison than the actual bars in front of him.  Truman Capote latched onto this idea and was able to exploit it to amazing cerebral depth within his work.  However, this work also illustrates another view of criminals within our society: the criminal act and the obsession that follows in its wake.

                Perry, on his way to the gallows, shakes the hand of his arresting officer and says “I am glad you could make it.”  These acts drove that officer to alcohol and his eventual death ten years later.  He became obsessed with what this act meant to him.  We, as a society, often deal with this obsession and it has become manifest in many different ways.  It can range from the whimsical (Dexter, buying Charles Manson LPs) to clinical (reading books about serial killers or other criminals, watching documentaries) to pathological (needing to meet criminals, erecting monuments or attending reenactments) to criminal (copycat crimes, crimes to prove themselves worthy of the mantle left behind).  This obsession is not new, but the manifestation of and the way that we individually deal with it has become much more open to options throughout the last few decades.  We are fascinated with criminals and that does not seem to be something that is going away any time soon.

                Foucault makes note of this, the entire first section is his own version of trying to understand criminals and how they operate within the common penal system.  However, he does give us enough evidence to understand that the soul, particularly the reason centers of a common man, can provide prison enough.  Then that prison can become an obsession of sorts for those that are trying to understand themselves, particularly their own dark passengers.  Foucault writes to understand the present, and in doing so unlocks some interesting thoughts about society’s obsessions and penal codes, most importantly that as laws became secular our understanding of the soul as a prison became more fluid and much darker.