Carceral realities: Representing prison in twentieth-century French fiction

This thesis examines the narrative mechanics, the thematics and the ideological impulses of French prison novels of the twentieth century. Each text studied in this dissertation—Victor Serge\u27s Les Hommes dans la prison, Jean Genet\u27s Miracle de la rose, Albertine Sarrazin\u27s La Cavale, and François Bon\u27s Prison—claims to document, rather than simply represent, nearly every facet of the prison experience. Like other trauma-based testimonial narratives, prison novels borrow their authority from real-life experience. The blurring of the boundary between fiction and autobiography is a necessary element in the establishment of discursive authority, for the novels\u27 autobiographical facets underline their referential grounding. While the texts are works of fiction, they are by no means novels in the traditional sense of that term. Prison novels are testimonial and documentary literature; and they constitute a literary sub-genre that has received scant critical attention. Each text examined in this study at once eschews its status as a work of fiction (to emphasize its referential grounding), and at the same time embraces fictionality (so the authors may manipulate their source material freely). It is the artful interplay of fictionality and referentiality that sets the prison novel apart from the traditional Balzacian novelistic model. Given the testimonial nature of the prison novel, this thesis contributes to the examination of twentieth-century literature of witnessing. As a social institution, the prison is particularly ideologically charged, and the carceral realm serves as an effective vehicle for critique of mainstream culture. This study therefore sheds light on the use of literary form for ideological ends, as it amply shows how narratives can be constructed to promote specific sociopolitical agendas. Finally, close examination of the thematics and the narrative mechanics of the prison novel contributes to ongoing theoretical and narratological investigations into the use of fiction to depict the ‘real.