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Text and the city
Essays on Japanese modernity
By Ai Maeda Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3346-5
Chapter One
Utopia of the Prisonhouse: A Reading of In Darkest Tokyo (Gokusha no yutopia)
TRANSLATED BY SEIJI M. LIPPIT AND JAMES A. FUJII
"The Utopia of the Prisonhouse" ("Gokusha no yutopia") originally published in 1981, addresses the intersection of literature, politics, intellectual history, urban planning, and prison reform in both Europe and late Tokugawa (1600-1868) and early Meiji (1868-1912) Japan. Its central theme is the unexpected conjunction between conceptions of the prison and utopia, which recurs in a number of different historical and cultural contexts. Maeda traces the superimposition of a confining material space onto an expansive imaginative space from various philosophical, literary, and artistic figures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to the genre of the political novel in the second decade of the Meiji period. Against this narrative of literary and intellectual history, Maeda further situates the interconnections between various efforts at prison reform and urban planning. Ultimately, the contradictory space of confinement and liberation serves as an image underlying the experience and representation of the emergent city of Tokyo in modern times, from government efforts to restructure the city based on conceptions of hygiene and visibility to Matsubara Iwagoro's In Darkest Tokyo(Saiankoku no Tokyo, 1893), which detailed the dark underside of the city submerged beneath the veneer of civilization and enlightenment. Maeda's essay, in both methodology and content, provides a powerful illustration of the complex and often cryptic trajectories connecting the discursive and material histories of modern Europe and Japan.
1
If utopian literature is the product of an intense vision to materialize human happiness within a closed and organized space, it perhaps maintains, at the deepest level, an analogical relationship to the mechanism of power that is the prison. For both the prison and utopia are nothing other than sub-species born from the matrix of the city. The image of the medieval European city, which constructed a living space in opposition to agricultural nature through the construction of an enclosure, would eventually create-at its positive and negative extremes-both the fantasy of the prison as a device for quarantine and punishment as well as utopia, which promised human freedom and liberation. No doubt, as the centralized nation-state of the modern period took away one after another the special rights and freedoms that had been permitted cities in the past-and thereby accelerated the cities' dissolution and transformation-these two extremes came to be grasped by people's consciousness. Utopia is an urban hallucination of an alternative nation-state, which represents an attempt to escape from the dominance of the real nation-state. The prison, in turn, is an alternative city created by state power through the inversion of the urban and which is inserted into the womb of the city.
The literature of utopia, which enjoyed a resurgence with the advent of the Renaissance, typically begins with an explorer's discovery of an unknown island in the middle of the ocean. This island is surrounded by sturdy walls, within which the splendid sight of an ideal city unfolds. Such an introduction is quite appropriate to the great seafaring age, but is not the golden island itself, isolated in the middle of the sea, a reverse image of the prison or the prison colony? In truth, the El Dorado of the New World, colored with rosy expectations of extreme wealth and romantic adventure, was also a dismal penal colony where serious criminals exiled from the Old World were sent. (Until the Revolutionary War of 1776, the number of prisoners sent from England to the American colonies exceeded a thousand per year.)
However, the indisputable evidence of an underlying connection between the prison and utopia is the fact that utopian literature was frequently conceived by actual prisoners. These writers literally experienced the paradox that the prison as space of confinement was also a space of the imagination. For example, Campanella, the author of The City of the Sun, was a patriot who was confined for twenty-seven years in a prison in Napoli, and the Marquis de Sade, who depicted a utopia of eros with the clarity of an encyclopedia, spent the greater part of his life in a state of confinement, from the time he was detained at Vincennes in 1763 at the age of 23 to his death in 1814. Undoubtedly, for both Campanella and Sade, the dismal experience of a life spent in confinement was inscribed within their utopian worlds in the form of a liberated will to power and sexual desire. The blueprint for the "city of the sun," in which the castle towering atop a hill is enclosed by seven circular zones, is itself an image of a prison, and the maxim of the city's citizens whereby "there is no personal affair of the individual that is not a part of the communal whole" calls to mind the organization of the prison managed in an ideal manner. As Michel Foucault writes, in Sade's case the images of closed spaces, including the "fortress," "solitary cell," "basement," "monastery," and "unapproachable island," were inextricably tied to his utopia, and the machines and devices to increase pleasure are virtually indistinguishable from the tools of torture. The private room where the libertines assault the young girl is itself the picture of a prison.
The eighteenth century, which Foucault referred to as "the age of the great confinement," was a period in which the double image of the prison, alternately expressing the pain of confinement and the pleasure of fancy, was willingly taken as a symbol of self-consciousness. W. B. Carnochan's Confinement and Flight (1977), which builds on Georges Poulet's Metamorphoses of the Circle and Foucault's Madness and Civilization, is a work of intellectual history that attempts to excavate the meanings of such tropes of the prison, primarily in eighteenth-century English literature. The beginning of the second chapter, entitled "Islands of Silence," includes an extremely interesting sketch that clarifies this theme by analyzing two contrasting images of confinement. The first is the well-known "Fifth Walk" from Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), within which Carnochan focuses on the structure of the closed ring that forms around Rousseau's fulfilled heart as its center. The "Fifth Walk" recounts Rousseau's life of seclusion on the Island of Saint Pierre in the middle of Lake Bienne, where he stayed in the autumn of 1765; it is a beautiful piece of prose in which the tranquil happiness of melting into nature is expressed through picturesque descriptions. Some sections express a philosophical resignation reminiscent of Kamo no Chomei's Hojoki [An account of my hut, 1212]. Yet it is nothing other than the image of the prison that Rousseau projects onto this place of such scenic beauty: "Because of the forebodings that troubled me, I wanted them to make this refuge a perpetual prison for me, to confine me to it for life, and-removing every possibility and hope of getting off it-to forbid me any kind of communication with the mainland so that being unaware of all that went on in the world I might forget its existence and that it might also forget mine." The distortion of this text, whereby the Island of Saint Pierre-which to Rousseau must have appeared a lost paradise-is transformed into a closed prison, no doubt reveals the form of self-consciousness peculiar to the Romantic human being. It demonstrates the depth of fancy that held Rousseau's soul, or perhaps the sensitivity of his ego. Rousseau withdrew from the slanders and intrigues of the peripheral world of human society and shut himself into a narrow circle. The Island of Saint Pierre, surrounded by Lake Bienne, is precisely such a circle or prison. Yet Rousseau's contracted ego also attempts to recapture a cosmic expansiveness through the inflation of fancy: "I have often thought that in the Bastille-even in a dungeon where no object would strike my sight-I would still have been able to dream pleasurably."
Serving as a distant response to Rousseau's image of a prison is the image of the desert island in Pascal's Pensees (1670). Pascal writes of feeling as though he had been brought to a terrifying desert island while sleeping-when he awakes there is no way to ascertain where he is, and all means of escape have been taken from him. He is nothing more than a trifling existence wandering the edges of the universe, and the world around him is enveloped in a deep darkness. Nevertheless, being nothing more than an infinitesimal point in the broad cosmos, he must begin with the self-awareness of his own wretchedness. "Let us, having returned to ourselves, consider what we are, compared to what is in existence, let us see ourselves as lost within this forgotten outpost of nature and let us, from within this little prison cell where we find ourselves, by which I mean the universe, learn to put a correct value on the earth, its kingdoms, its cities, and ourselves."
Pascal's melancholy understanding that the universe is itself a prison and that human knowledge confronts a limitless space without walls establishes a sharp contrast to Rousseau's happy prison, which is fulfilled through fancy. If Pascal's "prison" allows for a glimpse of the mystery of human existence suspended between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, Rousseau's prison offers a restful existence in a hidden house, a place that promises convalescence for a damaged ego. Using the words "Island of Despair" inscribed in the early pages of Robinson Crusoe's diary as a clue, Carnochan reads the meaning of Crusoe's life on the desert island as the transformation of the image of Pascal's desolate island into the image of Rousseau's comfortable prison. Here, I would like to touch on Giovanni Battista Piranesi's etching entitled Carceri d'invenzione, which transformed Pascal's prison into an icon.
In a small masterpiece of thematic criticism entitled "Piranese et les poetes romantiques francais," Poulet writes as follows of Piranesi's figures, who appear in identical form at all points on a giant staircase that is intricate like a labyrinth:
Self-multiplication is an attempt to discover one's self, to project everywhere an image of the self which can never coincide with it. Space and time are not only the primary place where self-multiplication takes place, but appear as the profound reason for the dispersal of the multiplied self within an expansive space-time. Multiplication is fragmentation and dispersal. Worse, no matter where one exists within the expansive spread of the double space-time, it is impossible to establish any relationship between human existence and the surrounding totality. This is the tragic sentiment already understood by Pascal, the discovery of an absolute separation between the infinity that encompasses us and the finitude of the time and place where we currently stand. Human beings wander within the broad expanse of the universe.
The prison depicted by Piranesi is not the closed space of solitary confinement but instead exists on a massive scale approaching that of a temple or palace (figure 1). The mass of small characters, drawn indistinctly like small points or stains, conversely reinforces the impression of the expanse and distance of this space. Massive columns and gothic arches, the winding staircase that climbs endlessly upward to a limitless blue sky. The borderline between the end of the building and the beginning of the sky is not clearly defined. (In contrast to the second edition of Carceri d'invenzione, which emphasizes the strength of the pillars and walls by highlighting the contrast between light and dark, I believe the first edition of the etching, which is drawn with a rougher touch, is more effective in generating the nightmarish effect of the space.) As Poulet points out, Pascal's image of the universe as prison, on whose edges human beings wander as miniscule points, is reproduced here with perfect technique.
In Carceri d'invenzione, strange devices and machines that evoke the actual tools of discipline and torture used in eighteenth-century prisons are distributed at strategic points and serve as accents pulling together the picture's composition. At the base of the round pillars are chains and iron rings to bind the prisoners, and from the ceilings dangle pulleys and cables to cause the pain of being suspended in midair. The wheels placed on the floor are perhaps for drawing and quartering. There is even a pommel horse bristling with needles. What one naturally imagines from the sight of these horrific devices, which cast their deep shadows here and there throughout the dungeon, is the hollow time after the rituals of torture have ended. The characters who climb the crowded stairways appear to be attempting a desperate escape from the pain of torture. Yet the winding stairs are ruptured bridges that break off in the middle, and none of the spiral staircases that continue limitlessly leads to any exit. If Piranesi's prison as a whole is a space that condenses the time of a nightmare, then the people on the stairs are perhaps nothing more than passing phantasms produced by the obsession of escape.
The labyrinthine prison created by Piranesi would eventually become a powerful motif that stirred the imagination of Romantic poets. William Beckford's gothic romance Vathek (1786) and Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), Alfred de Musset's La Mouche (1853) and Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle Dafne (1866). In Piranesi's prison, these writers saw the movement of a self-consciousness that is at once tied to a labyrinthine world yet that also continually desires flight and escape-in other words, something that touches on the core of the Romantic spirit.
However, Piranesi's original intent in creating Carceri d'invenzione was not the expression of Romantic self-consciousness, but the recuperation of baroque grandeur. At the very least, behind the Piranesi who continues a desperate escape along the spiral stairs, there is another, counter-Piranesi hidden in the image of Carceri d'invenzione. In the preface to his first published work, the Prima Parte (1743), Piranesi writes alternately of being moved by the magnificent scale of Roman architecture and of his despair at the lack of spirit in contemporary architecture. He claims that if no contemporary architecture is able to equal the Amphitheater of Vespasian or the Palace of Nero, then he will at least try to recreate Roman splendor through architectural drawings. Despite their massive scale, the Roman-style buildings and ruins in Prima Parte are unable to avoid a realistic narrowness in their details. In the Carceri d'invenzione published eight years later, however, standards of perspective and detailed technique are discarded. Instead, the free and uninhibited line, the contrast between light and darkness, create the effect of a fantasy space. What is contained there is the passion of Piranesi, who was drawn to the splendor and magnificence of ancient Rome. As De Quincey says, the picture overflows with an "extraordinary power." Instead of shedding sentimental tears for the imprisoned criminals, Piranesi praises the severe will to power embodied by the prison. Art as an expression of power. What Piranesi placed at the foundation of the world of Carceri d'invenzione was precisely such a baroque tradition.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, when the prison reform movement of John Howard led to enterprising architects being entrusted with the design of new prisons, the type of fear created by the space of Piranesi's prison played an important role in determining their outer style. In contrast to the interior of the new prisons, to which hygienic and humanistic considerations were given, their facades were based on various fantastic ideas designed to evoke sensations of terror. For example, at the new prison of Newgate designed in 1769, the opening of the empty and overpowering facade was extremely truncated, creating an effect of severe solemnity, as if the prison were a grave that would entomb its prisoners alive. The Provence prison designed by Claude-Nicholas Ledoux appeared from the outside like a combination fortress and mausoleum, on top of which the heavy porte cochere supported by short columns evoked an image of the gateway to Hell. The modern prison was called on to arm itself in visual signs emphasizing the prestige of the law and the will to merciless punishment.
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