Essay: Inferno and In the Penal Colony

Michel Foucault started his book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by describing two kinds of punishments — a brutal public execution and a severely regulated incarceration at a prison. From here he went on to trace the development of the modern penal system, describing the shift from the traditional understanding and use of power to the application of modern disciplinary power to control groups of people not just in prisons but also in schools, hospitals, and other institutions that govern modern life. In Dante Allegierhi’s Inferno and Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, we see examples of mechanisms of power that seem to match Foucault’s description of the modern use of disciplinary power. However, an examination of how power is exercised on the subjects of punishment and on the ultimate purpose for which the punishments are enacted show that the use of these mechanisms of power is actually more traditional than modern.
Dante Allegierhi’s Inferno
In Dante Allegierhi’s Inferno, the most obvious use of disciplinary power is the element of contrapasso, which assigns an equal and fitting punishment that mirrors each type of sin committed. We see some of the most obvious examples of contrapasso in the the fourth circle of hell where greedy sinners are doomed to drag enormous weights from place to place (Alighieri, vv.25–27) and in the outer ring of the seventh circle, where the violent, those who spilled blood, are punished by varying levels of submersion in a river of boiling blood (Alighieri, vv.46–48). This idea of a fitting punishment mirroring the sin brings to mind Foucault’s idea of a “technology of representation,” which he says is the basis of the art of modern punishment and requires an unarbitrary suitable punishment that will rob the crime of its attraction (104).
Disciplinary power is also present in the way that contrapasso is applied — by geographically subdividing hell according to the type of sin so that sinners are grouped together according to the kind of sin they are guilty of. This translates into the nine circles of hell, some which are further divided into subcategories. This use of space is very Foucauldian, in the way it makes use of space to exercise power and apply punishment. Foucault himself asserts that “Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony” (141).
Another aspect inherent in these divisions is that idea that both sins and sinners are ranked in a scale that compares the severity of their sins to everyone else so that the further in Dante goes, the worse the sinners he encounters in each successive circle. This practice of ranking reflects another distinctive feature of modern disciplinary power — normalizing judgment, which judges Individuals not “by the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of their acts but by where their actions place them on a ranked scale that compares them to everyone else” (Gutting 84).
However, although these mechanisms of power seem to match elements of Foucault’s modern use of disciplinary power, they are ultimately more traditional than modern because their end goal is punishment, not correction or reform. One of the major shifts that happened in the evolution of power from traditional to modern is that “The avowed purpose of punishment is no longer retribution (either to deter others or for the sake of pure justice) but the reform and rehabilitation of the criminal” (Gutting 94). Since hell is an ultimate destination and not a halfway place like purgatory, its denizens do not get a chance at rehabilitation. In addition, while the contrapasso system might serve as a deterrent to those still living, it cannot entice the sinners into good behavior in the same way that the modern penal system is designed to produce “subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile bodies’” (Foucault 138).
In Foucault: A Very Short Introduction, Gary Gutting provides a useful summary of this process when he says that “Docile bodies are produced through three distinctively modern means” and lists these as hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination (82). Although the use of enclosures is a key element in hierarchical observation, and ranking sins and sinners seem to point to both normalizing judgment and examination, the way these elements are used in Inferno does not match “the primary function of modern disciplinary systems: to correct deviant behavior. The main goal is not revenge (as in the case of the tortures of premodern punishment) but reform, where reform means primarily coming to live by society’s standards or norms” (Gutting and Oksala).
Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony
Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony presents a curious mix of the use of both traditional and modern disciplinary power as it situates the story in a time of change, marking a transition from one system of penal punishment to a new one. The focus of the story is on an elaborate torture and execution apparatus designed to take twelve hours to inscribe the sentence of the condemned on his skin causing him to suffer horribly before he is allowed to die.
The focus on a torture and execution machine tells us that the dominant type of mechanisms of power that we will see in this story is traditional. In his book, Foucault himself uses gruesome images of torture to contrast with later, gentler, more modern systems of punishment. In How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Gutting emphasizes the move away from physical punishment as one of the hallmarks of the evolution of the penal system when he states that “punishment in the 18th century is a matter of violent assaults on the body: branding, dismemberment, execution, whereas in the 19th century it takes the apparently gentler but equally physical form of incarceration, ordered assemblies, and forced labour” (Gutting 47).
Elsewhere, Gutting also emphasizes the public nature of executions, which the modern penal system has moved away from: “Punishment is no longer a public display, a spectacular demonstration to all of the sovereign’s irresistible force majeure, but rather a discrete, almost embarrassed application of constraints needed to preserve public order” (Gutting 80).
In our story, we see an example of the exercise of such public spectacles when the Officer describes how the execution used to attract hundreds of spectators:
How different an execution was in the old days! A whole day before the ceremony the valley was packed with people; they all came only to look on; … fanfares roused the whole camp; … the assembled company — no high official dared to absent himself … Before hundreds of spectators — all of them standing on tiptoe as far as the heights there … (Glatzer 91)
We also learn about other instances of the traditional use of power from the Officer when he describes the system that found the condemned guilty as well as in his descriptions of the kind of leadership that the former Commandant wielded in the penal colony.
Despite the very traditional use of power underlying the whole idea of the torture machine and the way the old Commandant ran the penal colony, we also see very curious invocations to a gentler and more humane method of punishment more closely related to the more modern use of disciplinary power. We see this in how the Officer sees the purpose for which the torture apparatus is employed: “How we all absorbed the look of transfiguration on the face of the sufferer, how we bathed our cheeks in the radiance of that justice, achieved at last and fading so quickly!” (Glatzer 91). Here we see that the Officer believes that the apparatus is designed not just to deliver justice but also to cause enlightenment on the part of the condemned. This avowed purpose of causing a moral change is reminiscent of Foucault’s insistence that modern disciplinary power is designed not just to punish but to reform through the use of psychological control on the subject of punishment.
Curiouser still is Kafka’s deliberate use of the body as a bearer of signs as the apparatus inscribes the sentence on the flesh of the condemned. This too is Foucauldian and calls to mind Foucault’s assertion that through the systematic use of modern discipline, the body becomes a site where political power is exercised (Foucault 138). The unfortunate fact though is that the apparatus is designed to kill the condemned, which makes the supposed enlightenment ultimately useless in producing Foucault’s “docile bodies.”
Conclusion
The lack of the possibility of real reformation or rehabilitation for the condemned in both Inferno and In the Penal Colony tells us that the mechanisms of power in these stories are exercised traditionally. However, the intersections between the competing systems of punishment in both texts tell us that the traditional and modern uses of disciplinary power are not mutually exclusive. Traditional exercises of power can aspire to more modern purposes. Conversely, like Kafka’s machine, even purportedly modern institutions of discipline exercise power in ways that invisibly damage the individuals they seek to reform or rehabilitate.