Criminal intuition: Late twentieth century novels of confinement

The problematic meaning of confinement in contemporary fiction is clarified by Foucault, who proposes that the prison offers a precise diagram of the functioning of disciplinary power, a mode of control which targets the "soul" in its program of training and normalization. Characters in recent confinement fiction discover their implication in the panoptic machine, the knowledge-producing network of power relations that creates the consensus reality of disciplinary society. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest all portray the panoptic machine as a generator of electrical current. This invisible force activates a grid of power relations that connects the modest regime of normalization (institutionalization and electroshock) with the goal of imposing political order. In all three novels, power confines by operating in and through the prisoner. The position of the prisoner correlates with that of the author who must challenge the univocal authority and totalizing structures of "official" fiction. Vladimir Nabokov's protagonist in Invitation to a Beheading dramatizes the situation of the author imprisoned by an aesthetic which reproduces discipline's attempt to capture and fix the flux of experience. Only by following his "criminal intuition" to a liberating form of expression can Cincinnatus C. dissolve the illusory world that imprisons him. Authors of contemporary confinement fiction likewise escape the authority of conventional narratives by adopting criminal knowledges that have been banned from and remain invisible in dominant discourses. Such knowledges have their roots in bodily and emotional experience, in instinct and intuition. The intrusion of these elements into authoritative master narratives generates a self-critical counter-narrative which reveals the essential emptiness of the official texts. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man emphasize areas of experience discredited and ignored in metaphysical narratives in order to subvert the authority of such texts. The cell of confinement comes to represent the fissures from which prohibited elements arise to turn master narratives back upon themselves and the void which is revealed at the center of metaphysical discourses.