Stereotypes about the Attitude of Criminals to their Bodies - Book Report/Review Example

Introduction Certain readings discuss different representations of the human body, including a physical nuisance, a convenient place for criminals to inscribe symbols and words, and as a means for partaking in analytical and narcotic pleasure. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze and compare the ways in which the human body is represented in Junky, by William Burroughs; Animal Factory, by Edward Bunker; You Got Nothing Coming: Notes of a Prison Fish, by Jimmy Lerner; Go Now, by Richard Hell; Permanent Midnight, by Jerry Stahl; Memoirs of a Tattooist, by G. Burchett; The Book of Skin, by S. Connor; Prison Tattoos, by D. Hall; and Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, by Q. Miller; examining the ways in which corporeality is decorated by tattoos, violated by junkies' needles, and confined in prison. Junky, by William Burroughs The content and style of this particular novel distinguish it from the others in the reader's memory. The overall tone is dry and distant, but the story itself is revealing and quite honest. Burroughs speaks as the observing eyewitness to the story, which refers to various criminals he has met throughout New York, Kentucky, New Orleans, and Mexico City, and his feelings and reactions to those individuals. One of the main goals of the work appears to be to dispel stereotypes that are often associated with criminals and how they treat their own bodies or how they appear to other individuals. Through showing the results of interacting with a vast array of individuals, Burroughs shows that the commonly-held view of the tattooed criminal is not always accurate. Clearly, most people would consider the criminals that Burroughs interviews degenerates, but he attempts to unravel this viewpoint throughout the context of this work. Even though the opinions and insight presented in the text are not supported by expert testimony, when believed they are quite convincing and definitely contribute to the overall interestingness of the novel. At first, the novel appears to represent a listing of facts. Once the narrator leaves New York, however, the overall tone becomes more personal and deeper in meaning. The narrator attempts to seek out the meaning of criminality and addiction and to plot his own personal escape from it. Animal Factory, by Edward Bunker This book details the violent life that prisoners are exposed to, including the viewpoint that life is cheap within prison and that the human body is a waste. The text shows no mercy. Bunker seems to write directly from his own experience gained within prison walls. There is a great deal of passion presented in Bunker's novel. Prisoners are presented as outcasts, and even the slightest wrong look to the wrong person can end their life. It is not surprising that they treat their bodies so negatively when faced with such a negative opinion of human life. You Got Nothing Coming: Notes of a Prison Fish, By Jimmy Lerner This book is wrought with sarcasm to the point that it is extremely annoying to the average reader. The book is comedic in nature, but perverse at the same time. Lerner tells of his neo-Nazi cellmate who likes to give advice on dating from personal ads. Lerner seeks sympathy in the novel, but gets nothing in return, which shows a great lack of feeling and emotion, as well as basic human compassion and concern, from those who are locked away in prison. The author writes from his own experience, and expresses human emotions when he tells of missing his daughters. However, his snickers and cocky attitude towards life show how meaningless he thinks criminal life really is. The human body is a waste of space for certain individuals, he conveys throughout his work. Go Now, by Richard Hell This work is extremely despicable and inexcusable, yet is appropriate for a wide range of readers. According to Laurie Stone of The Nation, the novel itself is actually "...guided by a ranging, meditative mind, the story becomes an emblem of how we live now. With candor the teller transforms blunders into the only shapely and reliably honorable offering that can be made of such materials: art. ...I was captive shortly after word one...makes Beckett's despair seem chirpy. ...Billy's most sordid plunges are rendered in a slit-eyed dryness worthy of Burroughs, but Billy is kin to Kafka and Bartleby, as well... Hell nails the autoerotic urgency of sexual hunger, our ability at the flick of a neuron to find everyone arousing, the landscape morphing into a mirror of our restlessness... The main thing to say about the novel is that it is real. It is utterly fascinating how something so raw can be so accurate. The perversion of the book is what makes it so fascinating. The author sinks to such depths within the novel and its climax is both exciting and tearful. According to the Village Voice, "Hell's brilliant junkie novel, Go Now, is prison writing from the lockup of the head, but unlike the majority of addiction testimony, narrator Billy's sentences are hammered out of hard-won insights, snaking around your basic pillars of consciousness--loneliness, self-disgust, oblivion, and sex." (Village Voice 2008). Permanent Midnight, by Jerry Stahl This book tells of the way Stahl climbed the career ladder all the way from hustler to a high-paid television writer. Along the way, he became a broke, junkie father with a very low self-esteem. Even though he saw himself continuously plummeting towards the bottom, he somehow still managed to land writing jobs that put him at the top once again. This book shows what it is like for a human to be self-absorbed. Stahl is so absorbed in himself that the book is boring to an outside reader whose interests are not in direct alignment or who has not been faced with the same or a similar situation in his or her own life. The book simply recalls Stahl's personal life along his rocky career path. He is quite funny throughout, as he discusses his suicidal grandparents, his childhood babysitter and what she forced him to do against his own comfort level, and more. The amazing part is how Stahl manages to survive the constant rise and fall that his life hands him. According to Booklist: "It's not pretty and it's not "professional," but it's Jerry Stahl's true story of his life as a writer. Beginning his career as a pornographer for Beaver magazine, Stahl later wrote fake sex letters for Penthouse and articles for Hustler before moving on to write scripts for such TV hits as Moonlighting, Thirtysomething, and Alf, jobs that put almost $7,000 a week in his bank account. This is also the story of Stahl's addictions to smack, coke, crack, Dilaudids--you name it. Moving between $100 L.A. lunches and meetings with Cybill Shepherd to dangerous scores in the worst parts of the city, Stahl managed to lose his family, his house, his screenwriting opportunity for the second season of Twin Peaks, and nearly his life. Permanent Midnight is not for people with delicate sensibilities or any other low thresholds for truth. Stahl's autobiography provides no glitzy Hollywood confessional with raised letters on the dust jacket, and it's not a self-help book on recovery. Instead, it explores, with brutal honesty and humor, the author's struggle between the nightmares of addiction and the nightmares of sobriety. Permanent Midnight is one of the most harrowing and toughest accounts ever written in this century about what it means to be a junkie in America, making Burroughs look dated and Kerouac appear as the nose-thumbing adolescent he was. Recommended for the true elite: those who can tell themselves a joke while slitting their own throats." (Burkman 2008) Memoirs of a Tattooist, by G. Burchett In this novel, Burchett describes being the leading tattooist in London for over 50 years. Throughout his life, he has seen and heard a variety of things and experienced quite a full range of occurrences. In addition, he has traveled extensively all throughout the world and gathered a variety of different types of literature covering the subject of tattooing. His clients have included everyone from the common fold to King George V of England and King Frederick of Denmark. Very little publications on the history of tattooing exist. Perhaps that is what makes this book so interesting. It is a true life account of the observations of someone who made art of the human body for the greatest part of his life. Clearly, he viewed the human body as a canvas and as a means to express oneself through words and symbols. He spent years upon years artistically spreading the beliefs, opinions, and emotions of all of his clients, sparked with his own, through the art of tattooing a wide variety and a large number of people. According to the author in his own words, "Tattooing by puncture, with a sharp tool or needle which introduces a dye under the top layer of skin, was first practiced, so far as we know, in Ancient Egypt. Clay dolls fashioned during that civilization are the earliest evidence of tattooing to have been preserved. I have seen two of these dolls, with their tattoo-marks, in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Dr. Hambly says there is positive archeological proof that body markings by puncture tattoo were applied to human beings as well as female clay figurines in Egypt between 4000 and 2000 B.C." (Burchett 1958) The Book of Skin, by S. Connor This book also describes tattooing as a form of art. The author believes that tattoos are a way of enhancing the skin and sharing the stories of those who choose to have their bodies tattooed with words and symbols. The book also describes other forms of skin art such as skin coloring and tanning, whether it be through the sun or through self-tanners. The author describes the human body through the skin. He argues that it is visible now more than ever, and that this is apparent through photography, film, painting, and music. He explores photography, disease such as leprosy and syphilis, flaying, cosmetics, and plastic surgery. He even explores paleness, pigmentation, blushing, cutting, darkening, and mummification, as well as the Turin shroud and the Invisible Man. He truly believes the skin can tell a wide variety of stories and tell a lot about a person as an individual. Prison Tattoos, by D. Hall This book is another account of how prisoners use tattoos to express themselves. In this light, it is not so much a means of art as it is a means of self-expression and rejection of authority. According to Dingman, "Tattoos have a distinct anti-authority appeal. The origin of this appeal might be traced to the early Christian proscription of tattooing and the resulting European laws against the practice. Whatever the source, tattooing today has an aura of the forbidden about it. Second, tattooing may have inherent appeal due to the pain involved in the operation and the permanency of the design; thus tattooing is restricted to the brave and the dedicated. Third, and most important: in some circumstances, people are deprived of the opportunity to acquire and display the ordinary means of identifying and presenting the self. Although all three factors are obviously related it is the final one, that of deprivation of the opportunity to acquire and display the usual and desirable means of self-identification, that we see as the most basic to the understanding of tattooing." (Dingman 1963) Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, by Q. Miller This book is comprised of a collection of 14 essays that tell the stories of prison life from a wide array of viewpoints over the past 30 years. Over this time span, an entirely new type of body of literature has emerged, as it has been written and published by prisoners rather than by the stereotypical author that serves as an English professor at some prestigious university. This has occurred as the overall prison population within the United States has literally exploded. These stories tell how prison life adjusts a normal human being and, therefore, that human being's body. The identity of a person is molded according to how that person perceives and undergoes life during incarceration. He or she may be swayed by the opinions and actions of those who are incarcerated along with him, or instead may opt to seek the outside world and remain strong against the internal negative influences that surround him. In this work, the essays cover a variety of different topics related to the human body. The first four explore race and ethnicity. The next three cover gender. The next session covers ideology. Finally, the last section in the novel consider the way in which aesthetics and language are used in today's prisons, as well as in the writings of prisoners or their close contacts. Conclusion Each of the texts described herein demonstrate a shockingly anachronistic reliance on Cartestian Mind/Body Dualism. They also show instances where the mind can be utilized even over drugs to provide pleasure to the human body. Each of the texts shows how the mind is privileged over the body. As given, drugs offer a dialectic of law and transgression, while both drugs and alcohol offer a dialectic of mind and body, these are all connected in prison. References Bunker, Edward. "Animal Factory."St. Martin's Minotaur: New York. 2000 Burkman, Greg. "Review of Permanent Midnight." Booklist. 2007 Burroughs, William. "Junky." Penguin: New York. 1977 Burchett, G. "Memoirs of a Tattooist." Crown: New York. 1958. Connor, Stephen. "The Book of Skin." Cornell University Press: New York. 2004 Dingman, "Tattooing and Identity," International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 1963 Hall, Douglas K. "Prison Tattoos." St. Martin's Griffin: New York. 1997. Hell, Richard. "Go Now." Simon & Schuster: New York. 1997Lerner, Jimmy. "You Got Nothing Coming: Notes of a Prison Fish." Broadway: New York. 2003 Miller, Quentin. "Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States." McFarland: Jefferson. 1995 "Review of Go Now." The Village Voice. 2008. Stahl, Jerry. "Permanent Midnight." Grand Central Publishing: Lebanon. 1998. Stone, Laurie. "Review: Go Now." The Nation. Read More