Chalmers, Rachel

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Jeremy Bentham'sPanopticon as Metaphor:Science and Supervision inTobias Smollett and Gilbert WhiteRachel ChalmersThe eighteenth century. the Age of Enlightenment, is for Michel Foucaultl theGreat Confinement, in which huge numbers ofpeople in Western Europe wereincarcerated for the first time.Enlightenment and confinement present themselves as mutually exclusiveconditions. But the apparent incongruity can be resolved in a single, totalisingstructure, a design so abstracted that only modifications of it were ever able tobe built; Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon penitentiary. It is easy for anyone whohas ever seen a gaol ba<;ed on the Panopticon design-and there are at least twoin Australia, one in Port Arthur and one in Darlinghurst-to be fundamentallymisled as to its projcct. For while sandstone gaols may replicate the radiationof blocks of cells from a central watchtower, the original Panopticon wasmeant to be made of glass.2As a building material, glass is uniquely qualified to enlighten whileconfining. The same thing could be said ofa putatively realist narratorial voicelike that of many eighteenth-century novels. Bentham's plan, as John Benderput it, 'suspended inmates in a transparent medium dominated by a hiddenomniscient authority'.] The institution of supervision lends credence to theillusion ofa super vision. Author and authority alike scrutinise the subjcct, whois backlit for their benefit as much as for its own. In each case the observationis the essence of the sentence. To be watched is both the punishment of theprisoner and the misfortune of the experimental subject. The Panopticon ismeant to comprehend, in the dual sense of understanding the subject andencompassing it, and so to afford a comprehensive punitive system, or acomprehensive description of natU1"al and human phenomena.Much of the scientific and literary activity of the eighteenth and latercenturies can be explained in terms of the cultural context of the Panopticon.In one sense the all-seeing eye is undiscriminating. Every thing and everyperson is of interest and has to be accounted for in the schema. All classes ofexperience are appropriate matters for investigation. But the watcher in thewatchtower docs draw a single, crucial distinction; the distinction between71The Sydney Society ofLiterature and Aestheticsitself and the subjects of its supervision. In making this distinction the 'eye'denies that it is also an 'I' , itselfa potential subject for scrutiny. This is a denialof implication, of a predicament that is implicit in the institution of thePanopticon. The watcher is in fact doubly confined, and hence, by virtue ofaninescapable physicality,centrally implicated in the slructureofpunishment forcrime.To put it another way, the design of the Panopticon is foolproof until it triesto manifest itself in practice. Both glass and human character are too frail tosupport the weight they are required to bear.I want to examine two texts in terms of their enlightening project and thephysical reality that confines them. These texts are neither wholly literary norpurely scientific; they are Tobias Smollen's Travels Through France and Italyand Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne. Both writers definethemselves somewhere in what was then still a continuum between men ofscience and men of letters; Smollett was a physician who wrote novels, Whitea cleric engaged in the study of nature. Each text owes something to travelliterature, something to journals, and something to the epistolary novel. Eachwas originally or ostensibly directed towards personal correspondents of theauthor, and only secondarily, if at all, intended for publication. Ironically,Smollen's book, the more overtly commercial of the two, never recoveredfrom Laurence Sterne's scathing satire of it in A Sentimental Journey. whileWhite's more reticent opus is reputed to be the fourth most published book inthe language. Finally, both books, as I hope to show, are partly predicated onthe unacknowledged physical predicaments of their authors.Toby or not Toby? Tobias Smollen's Travels through France and ItalyYou knew, and pitied my situation, traduced by malice, persecuted by faction,abandoned by false patrons, and overwhelmed by the sense of a domesticcalamity, which it was not in the power of fortune to repair. You know withwhat eagerness I ned from my country ...4The pretexts for Smollett's European tourare manifold and overdetermined.They revol ve around various meanings of the word consumption. Smollen wasconsumed with grief for his dead daughter. He wished to abandon Britain, asthe Earl of'Jack' Bute'sjournal The Briton had consumed and then abandonedhim. Like any tourist he proposed to sample new scenes, to enjoy a change ofair and to bathe in the sea. He committed himself to the time-consuming taskof producing letters as articles for consumption by his friends at home.The Ictters themselves, and by implication Smollen's preoccupations, areintimately concerned with the rituals of consumption, with the market-placeand the table. At every station there is a comprehensive list of foodstuffs72Rachel Chalmersavailable, often with suggestions for their preparation. Letter XIX, for exam-ple, describes the following produce of Nice; veal, fish, turkey, capon,partridges, hare, woodcock, pigeons, wild-ducks, teal, halcyon, king's-fisheror martinets, sea-turtle or tortoises, bread, green pease, asparagus, artichokes,cauliflower, beans, French beans, celery, endive, cabbage, coleworts, radishes,turnips, carrots, sorrel, lelluce, onion, garlic, shallot, potatoes, mushrooms,champignons, trucnes, pickled olives, oranges, lemons, citrons, citronellas,dried figs, grapes, apples, pears, almonds, chestnuts, walnuts, pomegranates,cherries, gourds, apricots, peaches, plums, musk melons, water melons,sorbets, wine. brandy and liqueurs. The local currency is also discussed andmost of the prices are given. Smollelladds that the natives are charged not two-thirds as much as the English and rails at the imposition. The leller is aneighteenth century consumer's guide to the south of France. Consumption is,in fact, the very means by which Smollell locates himself in a social andcultural framework in order to conduct transactions with the French. Byprivileging him as the observer, and by allowing the imposition of his viewsonto the observed, this framework reproduces the structure of the Panopticon.The point is that Smollell was dying ofconsumption, and that having beentrained in medicine he must have at least suspected this, and known that he wasincurable. But he refers only to 'the weak state of [his] lungs', to his 'verydeclining condition', his 'violent cough' and his 'asthmatic disorder'. Hisdenial means that his few overt encounters with the disease are charged withtension.In Boulogne he meets an English gentleman who seems 'far gone in aconsumption'. This gentleman believes he has caught cold from swimming inthe sea. As sea bathing is Smollell's sovereign cure-all, derived from Celsus'dictum 'in omni tussi uti lis est natatio',' 'in every cough, swimming is ofservice', he is amused by the man's credulity and self·deception. His consid-ered professional advice is 'to make a trial of the air of Nice, where I myselfproposed to reside'.6 Different diagnoses, same cure.In Montpellier Smollell declines to visit the celebrated local specialist,Fizes, but instead writes him a leller fully describing his own case, in Latin. Inspite of Fizes 's obviously limited knowledge of that language (he is a speakerof the patois ofProvenr,;al and Languedoc) he correctly diagnoses tuberculosis.Smallell is enraged. Significantly, rather than directly contradicting Fizes, hetakes violent exception to 'the stile of his prescription, replete as it is with adisgustion repetition of low expressions '; and this after Smollell himself hasdescribed in detail (but in Latin) the consistency of his own phlegm, thechanging colour of his urine, his flatulence and his nocturnal emissions. Hedemands the right of reply and a shon sharp exchange ensues, from whichSmollell emerges ballered but unconvinced, while Fizes finishes thirty-eight73The Sydney Society ofLiterature and Aestheticslivres ahead.'It is at around this time that the reader becomes aware of Smollen'sunreliability as the narrator of his autobiography. In spite of the languagebarrier, Fizes is a more competent and effective reader of the signs andsymptoms ofthe case than Smollell is himself. If the consumers of these lettershope to profit from them, they must decode Smollell's Latin (his medicalterms, his Classical education, his cultural conditioning) into the vernacular.Latin has ceased to be (if it ever was) a transparent vehicle for objective truth;it is an institution enclosing a living, suffering man. The dual nature of thePanopticon discourse is exposed. The watcher is himself imprisoned. It is theagent of his enlightenment that confines him. The distinction between watcherand watched, between subjective and objective perception, has been erased.'Every object seems to have shrunk in its dimensions since I was last in Paris. '.In presenting his case history, it becomes clear that Smollell is only tellinghis side of the story. More and more he allows his impressions to colour hisjudgement. He is ravished in Languedoc, enchanted by Nice. His ostensiblydispassionate scientific vocabulary draws on a novelistic discourse, itselfpredicated on the philosophical fiction of an impartial observer. The lellers,which are manifestly intended to affirm the concrete reality of Smollell's self-deceiving fictions (that he is curable, that he ean leave England behind him),realise their own negation, becoming suffused with Englishness and disease.When, as a practising Augustan, he contemplates at last the monuments ofClassical and Renaissance Rome, his response is so visceral that his criticalfaculties fail him altogether.I was not at all pleased with the famous statue of the dead Christ in his mother'slap, by Michael Angelo. The figure ofChrist is as much emaciated, as ifhe haddied of a consumption: besides, there is something indelicate, not to sayindecent, in the attitude and design ofa man's body, stark naked, lying upon theknees of a woman.'In this image Smollelt is face to face with both his unspeakable fears; the deadchild, the consumptive man. He is forced to utter the forbidden word. But theexperience is so horrifying that it takes on the aura of perversion, of transgres-sion. The watcher in the tower has become an incestuous voyeur, peering at thesecrets of his own soul. The illusion of scientific detachment, adopted in self-defence, has degenerated to the merely reflexive. By projecting his prejudicesonto what he sees Smollell has made the world a mirror. Now all he can see ishis own face reflected in it. Just as his enlightenment threatens to carry himtowards a recognition of his own confinement within the totalizing project ofthe Panopticon, he rejects the process altogether and resigns from his post asobserver declaring his curiosity satisfied.74Rachel ChalmersB flat or not B flat? Gilbert White's The Natural History ofSelborneGilbert While was born in the Vicarage in Selborne in 1720, and in 1793 he dieda hundred yards away in 'The Wakes'. Through his journals and letters, theparish ofSelborne became oneof the best known in England; and as a naturalistWhite himself made a considerable and lasting contribution to observationalmethod. His devotion to his native parish is commonly attributed to sentiment,and rarely to the acute coach-sickness which must have made every journey atorment. Having gone up to Oxford at ninelccn White resetL1ed in Selbornewhen he was forly. He rarely, if ever, left it again. He describes himself as a'stationary man'.IO The parish must have seemed part sanctuary and partprison; White set aboul making it his whole world.It is, I fmd, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full. that the districtproduces the most variety which is the most examined"·His project thus neally inverts that of Smolleu; physically unable to escapefrom his particular environment, While tacitly acknowledges, and in acknowl-edging celebrales, his confinement. Largely unencumbered by onerous dutiesto the church, he devotes his attention to the minutiae of Selborne; its rocks,roads, forests, hills. lakes and ponds; its birds and beasts. Sometimes he relateshis anecdotes wilh an anthropomorphic compassion that borders on sentimen-tality, as in this description of a broody raven whose oak was felled fromunderneath her.... the bird was flung from her nest; and, though her parental affection deserveda better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which brought her dead to theground.At other times his dealings wilh animals are disarmingly cruel. He pickles amouse and her child in brandy, celebrates the gallantry ofa red deer hind beingtom to pieces by dogs, and relates how hewent to the sheep-down, where ring-ouscls have been observed to make theirappearance at spring and fall, in their way perhaps to the north or south; and wasmuch pleased to sec three birds about the usual spot. We shot a cock and a hen12He is, himself, what he often describes as the ideal dweller in Selborne; bothsportsman and naturalist; and to suggest that these are incompatible in theeighleenlh century is to inlroducean anachronism. The most teUing parallel forthis sort of capriciousness is the means by which the governing classes of thetime attempted lO maintain social order; through the wielding of laws alter-nately draconian and merciful. Nor is this parallel a coincidence. The humanand moral laws from which the Panopticon is derived themselves claim to7SThe Sydney Society ofLiterature and Aestheticsderive from the minute observation of natural law. In each case a sentence isimposed upon a subject, with the effect of increasing scholarly or judicialdetachment. Language is made a distinguishing and distancing device. Whenhe says he procures a specimen for study, White kills it. He is little less detachedfrom his human parishioners.We abound in poor: many of whom are sober and industrious ... the parishswarms with children.Ultimately White's endeavours to comprehend Sclborne within an Enlighten-ment schema compensated in part for his isolation.We have remarked in a former letter how much incongruous animals, in alonely Slate, may be attached to each other from a spirit of sociality ... 13Once committed to paper, his precise, detailed observations became his linkwith an intellectual world beyond the parochial boundaries. The very existenceof the letters testifies to the existence ofa corresponding scientific community.Similarly, White's virtual obsession with migratory birds and his attention totheir arrivals and departures places him in a larger context by proxy. Movingin and out of Selborne, the letters and birds correspond to White himself,enacting his proscribed motility through the exercise of other kinds of power.Though White resigned himself to his incapacity where Smollett strenu-ously denied his, the result was the same. In subtle but pervasive ways White'simplication in the natural history ofSelborne means that his preoccupations areprojected onto his material. Once again the text becomes a pretext for anelusive autobiography.It has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours whose studies ledthem towards the pursuit ofnatural knowledge; so that, for want ofacompanionto quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slenderprogress ....4White and his brother arc famous for having calculated that the hoot of an owlis in the key of B nat. (As the Western octave scale was not yet standardisedin the eighteenth century, this may no longer be true.) Conscious that he hasbeen denied oral gratification-intellectual nourishment and conversation-White locates his sense of beauty and loss in his aural faculties; in theapprehension of sound. The only congenial conversation he hears, rather thanreading, is that of the birds. And he finds their discourse extremely sympa-thetic.The language ofbirds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech,very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood:''Little is said, but much is meant and understood. ' The same applies with equal76Rachel Chalmersforce to White's rare comments on his hearing in his letters to DainesBarrington. The firsl is objective, or nearly so.Swifts are no songsters, and have only one harsh screaming note; yet there areears to which it is not displeasing, from an agreeable association of ideas, sincethe note never occurs but in the most lovely summer weather."The hearer, by implicalion While himself, is a passive agent in whom soundproduces its effects. The nextlcllCr reveals a little more.Frequent returns of deafness incommode me sadly, and half disqualify me fora naturalist; for, when those fits are upon me, I lose all the plea~ing notices andlillIe intimations arising from rural sounds: and May is to me as silent and mutewith respect to the notesofthe birds, etc.. as August. My eyesight is, thank God,quick and good; but with respect to the other sense, I am, at times, disabled:And Wisdom at one entrance quite shut OU!.17Deprivation of pleasure is one of the central punilive effecL<; of confinement.Supervision requires the isolation of subject and of object. If the eye is theimage of the rational, impartial observer, White locales his humanity, hisaestheticism, his sense of isolation and his vulnerability in his ear. A final,uncharacteristically personal comment makes this abundantly clear.When I hear fine music I am haunted with passages therefrom night and day;and especially at first waking, which, by their importunity, give me moreuneasiness than pleasure ... IIBy transferring his sense of loss onto his sense of hearing, While recognisesand validates it and balances it against the power and aUlhority of his eye. Intacitly acknowledging his limitalions the observer denies them the power toundermine his structure. That his absorption in Sclborne is a consequence ofhis immobility is partly recompensed by the facl that his knowledge of itsnatural history entitles him to transcend the parish boundaries. Smollett deniesthat he is subject to confinement in any way, and his judgement suffers for it.By recognising the implications of his predicamcnt, White sees and compre-hcnds morc.Thcsc tcxts stand at the thrcshold of a modcm literary and scicntificdiscoursc,cxcmplificd nOlonly in thc worksofStcphcnJayGould and StcphcnHawking which commodify science for mass consumption, but in a scicntificmcthod which a<;sumcs thc dctachmcnt and impartial ity of the observcr. Moresubtly, the discourse of enlightenmcnt has incorporated structurcs of detach-ment and judicious observation into all kinds of exchanges. A speakeraddressing an audience is imposing sentences upon them and thus replicatingthe Panopticon project. The structure necds to be recognized for what it is: notonly a vantage poinl from which to scrutinize all subjects, but by virtue of our77The Sydney Society ofLiterature and Aestheticsinescapable physicality and human frailty, a confining and punitive cell.Notes1 Discipline and Punish: the Birth ofthe Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan, London, 1977.2 Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon and Postscript to the Panoptu:on, Collccted Works,Oxford. 1988.3 John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture ofthe Mindin EighJeenth·Century England, Chicago. 1987, p.23.4 Tobias Smollell. Travels through France and Italy, Oxford, 1981, p.2.5 Smollelt, p.t4.6 Smollelt, pAO.7 Smollelt, pp.88·1 02.8 Smollelt, pAS.9 Smollelt, p.25S.10 Gilben While. TheNalurall1i.rtory ofSelborne. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth.1977. p.3.11 While. p.S5.12 White. p.64.13 While. p.19.14 While. p.194.15 While. p.3!.16 While. p.216.17 While, p.17!.18 While. p.175.19 White. pp.244-4S.78.J

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as Metaphor: Science and Supervision in Tobias Smollett and Gilbert White

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Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as Metaphor: Science and Supervision in Tobias Smollett and Gilbert White

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