Abstract
Among the most dynamic passages in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is the portrayal of a prison in Chicago. The writer’s barely controlled rage against injustice and his unwavering political analysis fuse in a concentrated piece of denunciation:
There were hardened criminals and innocent men too poor to give bail; old men, and boys literally not yet in their teens. They were the drainage of the great festering ulcer of society; they were hideous to look upon, sickening to talk to. All life had turned to rottenness and stench in them — love was a beastliness, joy was a snare, and God was an imprecation. They strolled here and there about the courtyard, and Jurgis listened to them. He was ignorant and they were wise; they had been everywhere and tried everything. They could tell the whole hateful story of it, set forth the inner soul of a city in which justice and honour, women’s bodies and men’s souls, were for sale in the market place, and human beings writhed and fought and fell upon each other like wolves in a pit; in which lusts were raging fires, and men were fuel, and humanity was festering and stewing and wallowing in its own corruption. Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in gaol was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.1
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Reference
Franz Kafka, In the Penal Settlement trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (1949) p. 215.
Victor Serge, Men in Prison trans. Richard Greeman (1972 edn) pp. 45–6.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life trans. Peter Green (1965 edn) p. 554.
D. J. Dallin and B. I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labour in the Soviet Union (1948), quoted by Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (1971 edn) pp. 9, 454 and n.2.
Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems trans. Richard McKane (1969) pp. 10, 90, 95, 97, 99, 101, 105.
Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning (1971) p. 30.
Zhores and Roy Medvedev, A Question of Madness (1971).
See esp. Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (1942, 1966) and Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (1958).
Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (1970 edn) p. 138.
Huw Beynon, Working for Ford (1973) pp. 114, 118, 121.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (1958) p. 120.
Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (2nd edn, Paris, 1868).
Tennyson, Works (1897) p. 464.
E. M. Forster, Howards End (1941 edn) p. 44.
H. G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly (1946 edn) pp. 7, 9.
Evgenya Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind trans. Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari (1968 edn) pp. 288–9.
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© 1979 David Craig and Michael Egan
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Craig, D., Egan, M. (1979). The Literature of Unfreedom. In: Extreme Situations. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16180-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16180-5_8
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