BOOKS
Lawson, Steve & DiPiero, W. S. & Shea, John & Riemer, Jack & Druska, John
D i s c i p l i n e and Punish: The B i r t h of the PrJsom MICHEL FOUCAU, LT Translated by Alan Sheridan Pantheon, $10.95 [333 pp] W. $. DI PIERO Michel Fouoault is l~rolmbly the best known...
...And the rabbi must somehow tread his way among all these different and sometimes contradictory understandings of his task, and be true to his own understanding of his purpose and to that which he inherits from his tradition at the same time...
...There was no blood...
...To pit being against action is to misplace the problem...
...Each essay can stand alone as an experimental etching or a clustering of insights...
...D i s c i p l i n e and Punish: The B i r t h of the PrJsom MICHEL FOUCAU, LT Translated by Alan Sheridan Pantheon, $10.95 [333 pp] W. $. DI PIERO Michel Fouoault is l~rolmbly the best known and most controversial social historian of out ,t~rte...
...Foucault's perceptions are based on the language of the age ~nder study, those contemporary discourses which do not so much report the age as they embody or dictate it...
...Mellen does make some concise observations: how male stars of the Twenties invariably appeared in epics set in the past...
...Driver suggests that the arrangement of the book is musical...
...His gory, while inevitably centered on himself, reaches beyond those original confines to stimu}ate the self-understanding of whoever reads it...
...In analyzir~g the origins of these technologies of lao~ver, these "moral orthopaedics" which modify our perceptions of our own age, FoueauR is writing ~r162 he calls "a history of the .present...
...STEVE LAWSON...
...The power to pun,ish .now had a ,pezmanent home, and that monumental household was governed ,by a ctisci~line which also governed other institutions--schools, hospitals, the mil~ary...
...But very seldom does this self-disclosure become self-preoccupation...
...Which is what happens when a complex art falls into the hands of a determined theorist...
...First...
...The first essay "Tub Water and Sacred Ground" is a highly personal, introspective piece which takes place in .bathtub and backyard...
...list vocabulary, Foucau.lt's language is occasionally diffioult to penetrate, as it has been in all his books...
...In Patterns o/ Grace we learn a lot about Tom Driver...
...True Confessions JOHN GREGORY DUNNE Dutton, $9.95 [341 pp] JOHN DRUSKA True Con/essions begins with a cranky narrator, retired detective Tom Spellacy, whose street-Catholic flair for the colloquial sets us up for the cocky bravado, the jock-jocular worldliness of the rest of the :book: Anyway, when I got there, Crotty was bending over the second half of Lois Fazenda...
...What Mellen doesn't realize, of course, is that Casablanca, Monument Valley, and Sherwood Forest were about as "real" as Oz...
...Furthermore, Foucault can also write with severe, almost epigrammatic power: Discipline is an art of rank...
...Two other caveats: she's much stronger when it comes to evoking content than at discussing technique, but then technique isn't directly applicable to her basic argument...
...Five themes interplay and develop in the course of the seven essays...
...This is a generous and appreciative style and can easily be returned...
...The Enlightenment, in effect, not only discovered the tiherties by which we continue to shape our institutions and political structures, bu.t it also invented those invisible insmanents of .power w~hich the state (or institutions which owe their existence to the state) employs to regulate its citizens...
...Instead of a potboiler, Dunne might have the hardboiled kind of book that George V. Higgins has achieved several times (especially The Friends of Eddie Coyle...
...But there are too many paeans to nonsense like Dog Day A[ternoon, with its "honest" ho homosexuality...
...The most recent and as yet untranslated book by this master historian of confinement has to do with sexualiCy...
...He took one look at the top half and spilled his breakfast all over her tittles, which is a good way to mess up a few clues...
...365 pp] Joan Mellen's book opens optimistically: "This book is about the fabrication in American films of a male superior to women, defiant, assertive, and utterly fearless...
...Just this pale green body cut in two...
...The rittmlized torture and execution of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Fouca~t cites numerous contemporary accounts, and they are all ceremoniously gruesome) were political acts whereby the sovereign .took vengeance upon the body of the accused and thereby also impressed his will upon the body politic...
...Moreover, the reformist laws which revolofionized pumshment were olosely connected to the illegalities which the taws themselves oontrolled...
...Perhaps a version with a greater distancing of the narration from Tom Spellacy but no les, s engagement with the character and his experience, and a greater dependonce on the events of the murder mystery and its aftermath as they happen, from 1946 on, rather titan in retrospeetive frame, to locate the story's shape and ironies...
...I tell that story because one of the things that emerges .from this book is the number of...
...We are much less Greeks than we 'believe...
...People interested in the religious appropriar of human experience can say thanks to Tom Driver for Patterns of Grace...
...Tom and Des Spellacy seem just a mite more complex than Extension comic strip heroes...
...For thirty minutes his class was bedlam...
...About halfway through, True Con/essions becomes an intriguing read...
...and whatever his present conception, however childish or crass his characters appear, he usually conveys an affectionate interest in them, at least a reluctance to judge overtly, along with a sense of himself as impartial or part partial observer, and of his interest in discovering the truth...
...Not a drop...
...on a blue background and he turned blue...
...From his perspective Dunne is adept at focusing on telling vignettes, that at times connect to create their own significance...
...Aiso, I find incredible one of her climactic pronouncements: "Women have been eliminated from American films" (except for Minelli, Streisand, and Fonda...
...Somewhere in the middle section the narrator's language--some of whioh sounds gratuitous at first, because the context of the story is so shaky, the characterizations, so obvious--starts to work within the realized drama of a story...
...Somewhere inside it is a good small book, waiting to get let out like the truth at confession...
...There's something queer behind every screen male friendship, if Mellen is to be believed...
...The two best American films, Citizen Kane and Dr...
...His scenes of movie moguls Commonweal: 315 sweating out the previews of Dr...
...What must be considered is how ontological thinking "fits into" an analysis of action, how the "why" and the "what" questions combine for a fuller understanding of human life...
...That ,moment vchen the sciences of man became possible is the moment when a new technology of ~power and a new political anatomy of the 'body was knple,mented...
...The virtues of John Gregory Dunne's non-fiction work suggest how he might have accomplished this sort of novel...
...In a time when so much theology reads as if it were a computer print-out, Driver's elegant and engaging prose is a delightful alternative...
...She's especially deft at Thirties films---the emasculation of Gary Cooper's image thanks to his Capra roles...
...Thin the theater of the soa~.fold ie replaced by the prison modeled on Bentham's Panopticon, the disc/plinary 'hi're with its huge allseeing eye at the center...
...It may he Dunne's fault that he doesn't capitalize on his character and try for a leaner, simply superb police story...
...But R ,must also .be said that his "histories" are fi~.led with sensuous images, 'biz,axre events, dark ironies, and always the drama of a mind interrogating its own origins...
...Our institutions are so essential r the way we view our own .lives that we are controtled to a greater or lesser extent by the disciplines they impose, by their "constant gaze," which are .inevitably means of normalization...
...True Confessions is a middling, big book...
...It centers on the processes of alienation and reconciliation that go on between the self and body...
...Until the Enlightenment pu .nixhment ,was exacted publicly, written, on the body of the criminal...
...By the time the mystery ends in anticlimax, a new fix and Tom's revenge on an old boss from his bagman days, Tom has lost some friends, Des his bishopric, and the reader some of that buoyant sense of voyeurism which mystery creates and which Dunne manages to stir in the middle of his book...
...and the novel's heralded Catholic and political implications appear envisioned at times in a manner akin to a finger-paint version of J.F...
...Is anyone seriously interested in films not aware of the staying power of a he-man image on our screens...
...We are neither in the ,amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, in12 May 1978:314 vested by~ts effects of power...
...The ceremony of the rack and scaffold ~ves way to closed juridical proceedings, the extended suffering of the criminal is repla~ed by swift "painless" execution...
...His studies of the ocigins of the insane asyMm (Madness ana Civilization) and of the modern hospital (The Birth of the Clinic) are not simply histories of pttblic institutions...
...The enormous .irony from which Foucault's own discourse derives is that although the human sciences and their instruments seemed to he l~herations into knowledge, they were in fact new technologies of power, new and Commonweal: 313 more cunning devices for harnessing and manipulating human bebaMor...
...It was too much for Bingo...
...Dolinle (The Studio) or of gringo liberals bullshitting in the Delano bar during the Chavez strike (Delano) are effective because Dunne convinces us that he is suspending his preconceptions of the people he's depicting...
...As Murray Polner traveled around this country interviewing rabbis and interviewing congregants about their rabbis he found a host of different definitions of what a rabbi's primary task is...
...Tracy, Bogart and Gable are extolled for their emotionalism and charm, while "somber, vacuous" types like Bronson and Eastwood are deplored...
...There is material here on small-town Jewry but harcLly anything on the havurah movement or on campus Jewish life and its rabbinate or on the tension between the religious and the secular forces within the synagogue or between the synagogue and the organized Jewish community...
...In "Dear Tillich: To Be or Not to Be Is Not the Question" Driver juxtaposes a theology of being with a theology of action...
...sometimes it is forced and confusing_9 But always it is engaging and provocative...
...What must be learned is not a new allabsorbing emphasis but a pluralistic and complementary consciousness...
...Foucault's central argument, which he pursues with great attentiveness and rhetorical ease, is that penal reform, inspired by the need to construct "a new economy and a new technology of power to punish," replaced corpura.l punishment with disci, pline and surveillance, a mode more insidiously manipulative than anything that had existed previously, .and more sinister in its means of polit~eal co~t.rol...
...More specifically, he is an anatomist and diagnostician of those modern forms of power ,,vhich ,were the creation of the Enlightenment...
...the less successful...
...conflicting .and r dictory expectations of the Rabbi that are found within the American Jewish community...
...He contends that a concentration on being obscures the patterns of action and leads to "abstract man...
...They pot him on a red background and he turned red...
...The asylum, the hospit~l, the .prison: all modes of containment which have not only altered our systems of power but which have also created our modern concepts of abnormalRy, and each ~he subject of a 6ook by Foucault...
...To skim it for major points or struggle to locate Driver on the theolngical spectrum is to miss its impact...
...She was naked as a jaybird, *both halves...
...That something happened that day is beyond doubt...
...All of these touch upon the meaning Of "Word of God" which is "the patterns of experience (whatever they may be) which move us to praise and enjoy our co-creator...
...The essays are written to address the life of the reader and not merely inform him...
...Polner makes a good case for his ,belief that the Rabbi is a central figure in American Jewish life but he leaves us wanting to know much more about his inner life, his place in the power structure, and his response to the new spiritual questions of the seventies...
...The third theme is change, all things are in flux including divine reality...
...Students played dead, got hysterical, prayed fervently, snarled, growled, delivered jeremiads, ran around the chapel, and literally climbed the walls...
...The first is pattern, the way we actively shape what we encounter_9 This leads to the theme of co-cremion, the way all reality is apprehended in relation add interaction...
...He interviews one suburban rabbi who is involved in social action projects at home, where it is risky, as well as in the South, and he tells of one small town rabbi who finds himself in a community of Jews probCommonweal: 317 ably too small to be viable for much longer who sees his task as teaching and transmitting the tradition while his congregants look upon him as their spokesman to others, and not to themsalves...
...There is not nearly enough here on the rabbinate and its .psychic cost on the Rabbi and on his family or on the many who have chosen the rabbinate for two and three generations in a row...
...This might have been a valuable study if the author had focused on a few worthwhile films, but since her bias is sociological rather than aesthetic every American movie from The Great Train Robbery to Dog Day A/ternoon comes in for some debunking...
...The .prison could legislate behavior and thereby create a new creature, the del~nquent, one whom the prison makes a constant offender, the prod.igal son of the penal household...
...The top half...
...The final motif is awareness, especially as that loads to acceptance of the life processes...
...There is much here on the Rabbi as social activist but hardly anything on the Rabbi's own religious life or the place of spiritual search within the synagogue...
...Patterns of Grace is, quite simply, a ~ beautifully written book...
...Icons like Astaire, Chaplin and Keaton are passed over hurriedly because they are, it seems, unrealistic: the "harsh world" is receptive only to the misogynist super-male...
...Fourthly, the essays concern action, the movement from chaos to form and the way we initiate and participate in that movement...
...This essay is a small masterpiece, seventeen pages that expands consciousness and brings the reader to an appreciation of the sacrality of human life...
...With the history of the SpeUacy brothers' typical escape from an Irish ghetto, via seminary for one, prizefighting and police department for the other, as backdrop, the mystery of the so-called "Virgin Tramp" murder turns into a fascinating case of detection, as well as an inevitable sequence of revelations about the network of shady and often shared connections that Des and Tom's escape has required of them...
...Dunne's non-fiction makes me wonder how True Con/essions might have sounded had his reportorial technique informed it more fully...
...Patterns of Graee: Human Expet4enee as Word o f God TOM F. DRIVER Harper & Row, $10 [187 pp] JOHN SHEA Patterns o/ Grace is a fascinating, reflective, a~tobiographical excursion into human experience and religious reflection...
...Powers or a cartoon remake of Chinatown, another Los Angeles tale...
...This in the year of Annie Hail, The Goodbye Girl, Julia, The Turning Point, The Late Show, An Unmarried Woman, Three Women . .. the titles alone give Joan MeHen the lie...
...O~ of this situation Driver suggests a structure thar revolves around the nature of authority, chaos, and initiative...
...Bogart's persona, pitched midway "between the cop and the hoodlum...
...I don't think the simplicity of the novel is Dunne's fault so much as it is a function of his part-time narrator and full-time lead...
...But ,beyond his investigations ~nto the macl~inery of modern .,power, Foucautt ,is also (and ,perhaps more importar~ly) an his.torian of the act of perception, not merely of the thing perceived--an historian of seeing...
...And more than once her rhetoric sails out of sight: "The healing tears of a vulnerable male hero" . . . "his caustic macho self" . . . "Deliverance begins to crack:e with terror...
...Perhaps he will complete the task he has begun by giving us a sequel sometime soon...
...There are many figures that I wish Polner had included and many issues that I wish he would have dealt with...
...Indeed, his articulation of the conceptual details of the past --its "system of arrangemenCs"--may be used as an explanatory grid laid upon the present...
...the anti-intellect, ualism of film heroes...
...It promises to ,be even more insinuaticg than Discipline and Punish, itself a compelling and demanding ~,ork...
...Strangelove, get just thirty lines between them...
...Most of the time it is insightful and moving...
...The rabbinate are an extraordinary group of talented and pressured, harassed and restless, successful and yet frustrated men if this portrait is correct...
...Some want him to be a pastor, others a preacher, some want him to be a politician, others, a teacher, some want him to be a scholar, others an administrator, some want him to be in the forefront of social action, others want him to be a conservator of the status quo and not make waves...
...IM BRU[IIP RABBI: THE AMBRIC~,I EXPERIBNCE, by Murray Polner, Holt, Rinehart & Winston $8.95 [254 pp] There is a story that is told about a chameleon...
...the whole question of basic talent never comes up...
...This is high praise for any autobiographical work...
...As it is, the telling of True Con/essions is more contrivance than natural fiction, maybe because Dunne has tried too hard to signify, tO frame his characters for us, to explain scenes toward an end, to invent dimensions...
...they put him on a scotch pMd and he went crazy...
...Since modern institutions were conceived for the most part in the eighteenth century, Foucanlt has attended most closely to that period ~hen the sciences of man, those which promised new forms of knowledge, were born...
...A laudatory intentionto debunk a mythlbut what else is new...
...Part of Driver's style throughout the 4~ook is to thank people (Tilfich, Betty .Fuller, his wife, students, etc...
...The novel ends, after a long flashback midsection ('When") narrated in the third person, with the creaky contrivance of having our first narrator tie up all the loose ends of the story he's just starred in, which lunch with another ex-dick and news of his own priest-brother's fatal disease in the first "Now" section had started him, and Dunne's second narrator, recalling...
...Polner tells of men who were repudiated by their congregations because they were too far ahead of their troops on civil rights issues in the South in the sixties but he also tells of men who led the battle with courage and determination and were supported...
...how stories function in human consciousness in "Telling Time: The Importance of Stories and Theology's Tall Tale," and a critique of all that denigrates ex~rience and a celebration of all that enhances it in "Human Experience is Word of God...
...As such, they can be considered individually...
...Conceptually, the identities of prison, school, factory, and hospital may be closely matched: they are not cousins, they are siblings...
...There is much here on the Reform Rabbi but not enough on the new breed of Orthodox Rabbis...
...For readers like myself who are not con~forta, bly ~ami~iar with structura...
...Although these themes run through the essays, they do not so control their shape and substance that the impression of a unified statement is 12 May 1978:316 given...
...The two most powerful essays are those which begin and end the book...
...for the new life he has experienced through them...
...The insights are fascinating, but their relationship to the contours of the experience is tenuous...
...Anywhere...
...on a green background and he turned green...
...His new book, Discipline and Punish, charts the emergence of otw modern penal system and the codification of power that underpinned it...
...He freely reveals the inhibitions of his childhood, his high control needs, his relations with his wife, friends, students, and faculty, his difficulty with conflict situations, the failure of his academic reforms at Union, and his self-doubt...
...Speetaole is ~ransformed into s~veillance, the watdfful ,gaze of authorities over their charges, applying techniques of observation and examination which were so finely developed by Enlightenment thinkers...
...JACK RIEMER BIO BAD WOLVES: MASCULINITY 1N THE AMERICAN FILM by Joan Mellen, Pantheon, $12.95...
...Dutton puffs this book not only as "'a superb police story'" (Fadiman), but also as a multi-dimensionai novel about "'a complex pair of brothers' ". The Cruth might be simpler than that...
...We ~live more than ever, Foucault reminds us, in a world of surveil, lance, Observation, peeping...
...As if we didn't know...
...What happened is still in doubt...
...they are provocative analyses of power structures, of that emblematic tinkage between sovereign, state, and citizen, which fina~|ly determines the character of the society those institutions are meant to serve...
...The difficulty is how we "segment out" aspects of human existence and parade them as the total stow, not allowing other aspects importance or worth...
...I~he Classical age discovered the body as object and target of power...
...the cheerful eroticism of It Happened One Night...
...The point of both pieces is "whenever our awareness is heightened by unjudging acceptance of whatever is going on, we enter upon holy ground and are moved to praise...
...any alteration i.n tern was also an a'l.teration in t~e n'aeure of the iliega~ties, since ,the two comprised what Foucault calls "one ~uridical economy"--they were "in continuity...
...The remaining essays concern Driver's journey toward "Letting Go...
...This book must be "mediCated through...
...God, Self, and Authority" recounts the day Driver's students went "bonkers...
...Both focus on the exploration and acceptance of .bodily existence...
...Strongest among those virtues is a reportorial distance he maintains, but couples with an openness toward his subjects and the shapes of their experience...
...Although this can be the case and for many people has ,been, it is not inevitable...
...In ~ eighteenth century, however, the soul replaces the body as the objeot of punishment...
...Breathe in Me, Breath of God" is a more genecalized reflection on the "conspiring" of human and divine breath...
Vol. 105 • May 1978 • No. 10
