Time - Incarceration

 I will never get around to working on a prison novel. I have had one in mind almost since I reached Fort Dix FCI. Time is always a problem.

There are great blanks of nothingness when incarcerated. You who were locked down for COVID know a little of what it is like to be incarcerated.

Reading What Kingdom, a review by Vika Mujumdar from Necessary Fiction, I see much of relevance to a prison novel.

In poetic fragments of lyrical prose, Gråbøl’s narrator grapples with what it means to live within the system of the psychiatric institution. Time and space are complicated by the regimentation of the psychiatric institution and her and her peers’ experiences as patients in this setting. The institutional order is juxtaposed with the narrator’s rich interior life as she considers materiality, objects, and her built environment. Opening the novel, the narrator says: “Of all the hours of day and night I like the earliest morning best. That space of time that’s neither one or the other.” Liminal time becomes one of the structuring principles of both the book itself and the lives of the characters. Within the setting of the psychiatric institution, which removes them from the historical realities of their lives, they exist in a constant negotiation with both the past and the future.

That removal from history is what is really punishing about punitive justice. One is rendered to be both dead and alive; dead to the outside world but alive within the institution.

Structuring a prison novel could learn from this:

Formally disrupted by white space and by section breaks, What Kingdom is a necessary, compelling, and unflinching documentation of structures of care and the fragmentation of time they can occasion. The narrator describes the facility in which she lives as “this trial home, this impermanent halfway house”— yet against this home and all it symbolizes, she articulates a visionary future of collective life that includes her friends, their environment, and her own psychological landscapes. Gråbøl suggests that “[t]o preserve something” is “to give it a name, to feel it.” What Kingdom is a testament to this idea—what it means to preserve a time, through the narrator’s careful cataloging of the everyday, to examine a moment in time in all its expansiveness. 

I suppose the same would apply to a COVID novel.

sch 9/2