Writers in Prison

Hugh Oliver is Editor-in-chief of OISE Press, Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education.

This scholarly work’s author is a professor of sociology at York
University in Toronto. Therefore, we should not be surprised that his
prose style derives from the language of the social sciences—a complex
and sometimes-unintelligible jargon to the uninitiated, although Davies
is an unusually articulate exponent. His book operates on three levels:
“an attempt to understand the imprisoned intellectual as writing not
only in a margin of the society that imprisons, but also in a margin of
the prison itself”; “the writer who operates directly out of a
prison culture, whose messages and letters are as often as not
forgotten, lost or destroyed”; and the merging of writings in “a
collectivity of epic and ur-epic where the oral stories and songs become
part of a folk-history of incarceration, exile and slavery.”

Although the book’s argument is both too complex and too
comprehensive to encapsulate in a few sentences, the most striking theme
is the world of the prison as a metaphor for the outside world.
“Prison narrative usually entails a re-thinking of all our experience
and the language through which our lives are expressed.” The
“writers in prison” on whom Davies draws include Genet, Wilde, Levi,
Boethius, Bakhtin, Chessman, Cleaver, and de Sade—spanning a range of
nationalities and historical periods, but ultimately with a contemporary
emphasis.

This book is an insightful and well-argued interpretation of a major
literary genre, and represents an important addition to sociological and
literary scholarship. A pity it is not more accessible.