From Joe Martin, Keeper of the Protocols: The works of Jens Bjørneboe in the cross-currents of Western literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), p 69-72. 1996 by Peter Lang Publishing. Used by permission.
[Jens Bjørneboe's novel Powderhouse is set in La Poudri&1egrave;re,] a unique mental hospital in the south of France... According to [chief physician] Lefévre's policy, everyone at La Poudrière has the right to give lectures on the topic of their choice. In the course of the narrative, three such lectures are given.....
The second lecture (134-77) is given by the professional executioner Lacroix, still wearing high bandages about his throat after his recent suicide attempt. His topic will be execution and executioners—"from the point of view of the executioner," one who has "the same right to respect, kindness and compassion as all other human creatures have" (134).
What follows, in the text, is a forty-two-page detailed description of the executioner's trade and art, from the high Middle Ages to our day. Generally speaking, the techniques described range from the oldest traditional forms, the chopping block and tortures associated with the Inquisition, hanging, the guillotine, the firing squad, and finally the American electric chair. The focus of the lecture, more than anything else, is on the changing nature of killing by the state, and its effect on those "men in possession of special qualities" who carry it out.
Once again, Bjørneboe observes some of the same trends as his contemporary Foucault in Surveiller et punir. They both note that the notion of the sanctity of the body led to the transformation of public torture, to a demonstration of atonement "without suffering," carried out coldly with supposedly scientific and painless methods, in secluded spaces which shroud the event in an air of mystery for the modern public. Whereas Foucault seems to acknowledge a certain increasing humaneness—coupled, paradoxically, with growing authoritarianism—in disciplining and punishing, Bjørneboe's standpoint is that this is only a myth which the new methods of carrying out and staging executions are designed to promote. [1]
From the point of view or the executioner/lecturer, the executioner has always been an artist observed by a public of hypocrites. "To take the life of another human being without pain and brutality, is he not an artist?"
But my colleagues are unfortunately far from artists of this dimension. Sentimentality and weakness are incompatible with the executioner's work, as with that of a great violinist. Or the performance of a great pianist. Not to mention the profession of authors and poets: here everything is coolness, awareness and precision. (137)A change in public taste at the end of the 1700s made the work of an executioner dangerous, and "a pianist who loses his nerve and self-control will hardly be trampled to death by a mob, such as happened many a time in the era of public executions" (137). It was the public nature of the spectacle which caused the loss of nerve, the half successful first attempts by executioners in the procedures, the frequent disasters.
The great "houses" or dynasties of European executioners—the Langs, the Deiblers, the Flurats, the Deussers—are here given the chance to have their story told. Society had forced the burden upon them. There seemed to be no escape from the hereditary nature of the work, nor from the ostracism of the community which required that it be done. In their saga, the society they serve is in fact their nemesis. The henchmen become victims, dionysian performers in a great repeating ritual, the sacred mission of which prescribes that they must carry the responsibility of society's need to kill on their shoulders. They are figures at the same time sacred and accursed. A curious aspect of Bjoslash;rneboe's thinking here is that it is the executioners who become simultaneously holy and accursed figures, the sacred outcasts—like the pharmakos or scapegoat—that in antiquity were usually the victims of the ax themselves. (2)
It is in 1793 during the Great Revolution—when the doors to the Age of Reason and to increased humanitarianism should have been thrown open by the philosophies of humanism— that the guillotine is introduced as a serious innovation: "The quick, painless, and one hundred percent effective execution" (145). Other methods were introduced with the same ideas in mind, and in this way Europe entered the age of the mass execution. These passages exemplify the way Bjørneboe is constantly on the lookout for ways in which social innovations can demarcate new "ages" in history. Thus, the chapters of this volume, such as this one devoted to Lacroix's lecture, use the calendar of the French Revolution: it is dated 24. prairial, year 176.
The lecturer now puts forth bountiful evidence to counter the claims of the exponents of these technological innovations. Scientific investigations and long experience invalidate the claims of the period. The evidence: life is observed in amputated heads by reputable scientific authorities; the frequent need to repeat the prolonged shock or "burning" in the American electric chair, and the truth about why autopsies are held immediately after the procedure; the remarkable record of fallibility with firing squads. All of this is explored with a cool directness....
Rolling off a list of names of executioners who ended on the scaffold themselves, the lecturer turns to the modern myth of the social function of executions (148). Remarking that "no one knew better than these men what kind of horror is involved in an execution," he addresses the theory of the general preventative effect of capital punishment. For who should fear the scaffold more than men who have carried out thousands of executions? "What deterring effect has it had? None." He continues: "The amputated bodies of the executed executioners are the best historical and psychological evidence against the punishment's general-preventative effect" (148).
On the other side of the coin are the accounts of executioners who have passed sentence—and carried it out—against themselves, in Germany, England and America. Finishing his long compilation of accounts the lecture asks a question on behalf of the executioners: "Who has turned us into suicides, ladies and gentlemen?" (175).
Lacroix's long lecture is a segment which could well be the most potent literary case to be made against capital punishment in any language, and this might be said to apply as well to Powderhouse as a whole.
NOTES
Foucault writes of the late 1700s and early 1800s:
Beneath the humanization of the penalties, what one finds are all those rules that authorize, or rather demand, "leniency," as a calculated economy of the power to punish. But they also provoke a shift in the point of application of this power: it is no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular brandings in the ritual of the public execution; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all. It is no longer the body, but the soul, said Mably. And we see very clearly what he meant by the term: the correlative of a technique of power. Old "anatomies" of punishment are abandoned. (Discipline and Punish, 101) Back
2. Once again, Bjørneboe touches on some crucial points that will be elucidated later by René Girard in La Violence et le Sacreacute;. Interestingly, Girard's description of the pharmakos as a scapegoat figure matches Bjørneboe's description of the role of the executioner point by point:
On the one hand he is a woebegone figure, an object of scorn who is also weighed down by guilt: a butt for all sorts of gibes, insults, and of course, outbursts of violence. On the other hand, we find him surrounded by a quasi-religious aura of veneration; he as become a sort of cult object. (96)
He adds, in a passage that echoes Bjørneboe's idea of the executioner from the age of the enlightenment on:
The word pharmakon in classical Greek means both poison and the antidote for poison, both sickness and cure—in short, any substance capable of perpetrating a very good or very bad action.... The pharmakon is thus a magic drug or a volatile elixir, whose administration had best be left by ordinary men in the hands of those who enjoy special knowledge and exceptional powers—priests, magicians, shamans, doctors and so on. (95)Back