ABSTRACT
Prisons are scandalous, but they make people dream. This paradox encapsulates the ways in which imprisonment is dealt with in classical literature, where notions of punishment appear so frequently that their collection in a text would make a wonderful volume, putting dry sociolegal volumes to shame (Brombert, 1975). Prisons are not in nature, but ‘man never ceases to pervert his own nature through the tragic pride of condemning his brother’ (Hugo, 1969: 17-18). The history of society, according to Chekhov (1987), is the history of how we incarcerate our fellow creatures. However, the prison cell is also the space of dream and poetry, of meditation and religious fervour. Calderón de la Barca (1925) has his hero secluded in a castle, where he learns that dreaming surpasses living, while Pirandello’s (1922) ‘Henri IV’, after a brief excursion outside, rather than face the ruthlessness of those surrounding him, returns to the reassuring, maddening tower where he has buried himself.
