Prison Stories: Writing Dublin at its Limits

Abstract

Declan Kiberd notes that, for the imprisoned Oscar Wilde “jail revealed to the writer the soul of man under capitalism, allowing him to ‘see people and things as they really are’ ”.1 Exclusion from society paradoxically afforded Wilde a deeper awareness of its underlying realities, compelling the aes-theticist par excellence to reach beyond “art for art’s sake”. Kiberd even terms Wilde’s prison poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898), an “avowedly proletarian” work, because of its representation of prison suffering as a foil for the social decay of capitalist society and its existence of “living Death”.2 Prison, for Wilde, was a darkroom, a place in which society’s negative could be developed into a crystallised depiction of its true social relations, and this use of what Wilde saw there as a mirror to life under capitalism resonates in the prison narratives this chapter examines. Brendan Behan, Peter Sheridan, Mannix Flynn and Paula Meehan’s prison plays transfigure the carceral experience, developing it into a synecdoche for a failed society. Again we return to a mode of writing, which, “while it is often grounded in an ostensible realism, will nonetheless adopt descriptive or allegorical modes in which meaning does not so much depend on realist plausibility, but on a symbolic or metaphoric representation of a ‘reified’ consciousness.”3 In these plays, Behan, Sheridan, Flynn and Meehan follow Prisoner C33 (as the jailed Wilde was known), who smote the hand that “straws the wheat and saves the chaff / With a most evil fan”.4