The Anarchic Prisoner
Part 1: Arrival
Arrival
Introduction - Methodology
The Prisoner was broadcast on ITV during 1967/68. It was produced by Everyman. This production company was owned and run by David Tomblin and the star of the series, Patrick McGoohan. The production was financed by ITC, Lord Grade's media enterprise. McGoohan had originally envisaged a run of only seven episodes, but Grade persuaded him to extend the run, in order to provide a more attractive product for the American networks. A year after going into production, only thirteen episodes had been made (whereas Man in a Suitcase had completed thirty episodes in an equivalent period). Moreover, 'rumours about McGoohan's erratic attitude were beginning to circulate' (1). Four more episodes were ordered in a desperate attempt to make the series saleable. This attempt at a rescue failed:
The Prisoner remains a bitter commercial failure... McGoohan's career
certainly suffered and his
company, Everyman Films Ltd... was wound up in 1974, with debts of more
than £63,000. (2).
Despite this commercial failure, The Prisoner has not disappeared. For instance, there is a fan club (Six of One), which has been running for twenty years, with 'a membership of over 3,000' (3). Indeed, it is quite ironic that The Prisoner is currently being employed by Lombard Business Finance in an advertising campaign due to research which revealed 'that the company needed to emphasise its uniqueness within a market in which differentiation is... difficult to achieve' (4). As In The Village (Six of One's fanzine), relates
It
is a tribute to the longevity of The Prisoner that
almost thirty years
since its initial screening the
programme still has a
strong enough image to carry
such a high profile
promotion. (5).
The fans themselves seem to have an endless list of eulogies with which to praise the programme: 'the greatest science fiction film of all time' (6), or 'For me, The Prisoner was - and still is - the best television programme I have ever seen' (7). For them, The Prisoner is nothing less than a work of art:
The
list of allusions seems to go on forever: Kafka,
Orwell, Lewis Carroll,
Chesterton are the most often
cited, but also, on account
of the dream-like beauty
of the images,
surrealist painters such as Magritte. (8).
However, such statements would appear to be problematic in a Cultural Studies analysis of The Prisoner. Jonathan Coe, in the essay which greatly influenced the writing of this dissertation, describes the enunciation of quality judgements in the academic field as 'heresy' (9). Coe believes that if
we
were to draw a contrast with the 18th- and 19th-
novel, it seems clear that our contemporary versions
of the Pamelas, the Tom Joneses, the Oliver Twists...
characters familiar, even in their own time, to every
literate household in the country - are to be found
not between the covers of a book but on television. (10).
One of Coe's claims is that 'The Prisoner offers a more interesting and imaginative account of fractured male identity than Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince' (11). Cultural Studies is not spared in his assault:
Rare
indeed is the cultural studies pundit who is prepared
to step gingerly out of
the postmodernist closet and
actually argue a
critical preference for one work over
another (12).
Coe even offers an argument for where Cultural Studies went 'wrong':
before
long, it had become permeated by a fierce
scepticism about the whole
notion of artistic "value";
a scepticism inspired both by
class conscious feelings
of anti-elitism and by the
theoretical writings of Barthes,
Derrida and others from which
it was borrowing freely (13).
This 'failing' has not gone by unnoticed in Cultural Studies, as reported by Jim McGuigan. As Coe readily admits, Cultural Studies has proffered quality judgements in the past. For instance, the attempt by the editors of Primetime to 'construct a canon of "classics" (The Prisoner and so on)' (14). Jim McGuigan, with a quotation from Geoff Mulgan, has articulated what the problem is: '"an alternative to the stale debate between a crude populism... and an equally crude elitism" must be sought' (15). The tension would appear to be rooted in the High/Low Culture debate. The difficulty which populists face is that while they attack the cultural class system which denigrates popular culture, they become in danger of replicating that class system by drawing up a canon of works (16a). The irony may be that the very way out of this cultural impasse, is via one of the many writers who brought us into it in the very first place.
Number 2: You mean...
Number 9190771: Yes - Roland Barthes! It is my argument that the very authors who are associated with Postmodernism have rarely ever been employed correctly.
There
is a scene in the final Prisoner episode, Fall Out, where Number 6, having
survived the final test, is allowed to become an individual. The
President (Kenneth Griffith), invites the former prisoner to lead the Village
community. However, when the individual tries to speak, his voice is
drowned out by cries of 'Aye, aye, aye' (or 'I, I, I'). The President
gives a Papal salute, as the would-be Author-God gets more infuriated.
Number 9190771: My argument is that Barthes has become a prisoner of his own text. He has been worshipped as an Author-God, but like all gods, nobody listens to a word he says!
Number 2: That's rather cynical!
The Death of the Author, the text which is at the heart of this debate, should be seen as a liberatory model:
We
know now that the text is not a line of words
releasing a single 'theological' reading (the
'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-
dimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash. The text is
a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
centres of culture...
In
precisely this way literature (it would be better
from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign
a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the
world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-
theological activity that is truly revolutionary since to
refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and
his hypostases - reason, science, law (16b).
Number 9190771: Thus I plan to do a postmodernist reading of The Prisoner. To do this, I will employ the writings of fans, as equally valid as mine own. As Francois Riviere wrote, 'The broad vision of McGoohan paved the way for the arrival of a post-modernist trend' (17).
Number 2: This is all highly irregular. You are ignoring procedure. What about audience research?
Number 9190771: Haven't got the money, Dad. The Doctor Who audience project was conducted over twelve years and two continents! (18).
Number 2: Then why don't you use their research? They're in the same field as you.
Number 9190771: Don't like to, Sir.
David
Morely did the first work in this area for Cultural Studies with his Nationwide
research. However, he was also the first to admit that such work was
problematic (19).
Number 9190771: Why is it that Cultural Studies demands that one must study the audience, as well as, or rather than, the programme itself? And then invite people who don't even watch the programme to talk about it? When did these scientists last survey a novel and its audience? And ask people to discuss something which they haven't actually read?
NUMBER 2 GOES RED IN THE FACE.
Number 2: Well, er... Every day, actually!
A good example of Cultural Studies audience research is Constance Penley's work on the 'slash' fiction of Star Trek fans. She relates how some of these fans reacted to her work: 'They don't feel that I have gotten it right unless I account for the individuality of every fan, but to write critically, one must be able generalize, see patterns' etc. (20). One could criticise Penley for having a deep lack of empathy for her 'subjects'. An excerpt from The Prisoner may clarify why the fans were upset. In Arrival, the Prisoner is confronted by a new master:
New No.2: I'm interested in facts. Your only chance to get out of here is to give them to me... and if you don't give them, I'll take them. It's up to you, think about it. Good day, Number 6.
Prisoner: Number what?
New No.2: Six. For official purposes. Everyone has a number. Yours is number 6.
Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a person.
New No.2: Six of one and half a dozen of the other! (21).
One could make a much more brutal analogy, in an extract from Toni Morrison's Beloved:
School
teacher'd wrap that string all over my head,
'cross my nose, around
my behind. Number my teeth.
I thought he was a
fool. And the questions he asked
me were the biggest
foolishness of all (22).
There is something distinctly problematic when a self-professed feminist, such as Penley, uses methods which are related to those employed by a white slave owner to subjugate a black female slave. If Penley desired to do an ethnography of cult TV fans - because, as The Independent recently described it, it is 'the new rock'n'roll' (23) - then why is she so careful to maintain her 'distance' from the fans (24)? If the 'text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,' then why does Penley erect a barrier between her and the fans, in a Postmodernist ethnography?
Number 2: Rhetorical questions have no place in an academic dissertation!
Number 9190771: They are not rhetorical. I fully intend answering them.
Number 2: And how, pray, do you intend to do that?
Number 9190771: By doing a Postmodernist reading of The Prisoner.
What better model could one have than a fiction all about the nature of subjectivity and the freedom of the individual! If the raison d'être of The Prisoner is to find out 'Who is Number 1?', then the answer cannot help but be far ranging. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is no such thing as a coherent ego. Janet Wolff quotes Coward and Ellis:
The
erratic and devious presence of the unconscious,
without which the position of the subject cannot be
understood, insists on heterogeneity and
contradictions within the subject itself (25).
Indeed, Jacques Lacan's version of the Oedipal Crisis could even be dramatised in Fall Out:
The
yearning for integration and unity fly in the face
of discoveries in linguistics, psychoanalysis and
poststructuralism about the construction of the
subject - namely that we are always beside ourselves
in multiple senses (26).
Perhaps an ideal way to write theory in the future could be via fictions such as Number 9190771 (inspired by the rebel 48 in Fall Out, with Leo McKern providing the basis for Number 2). This is not unprecedented: some Ethnographers, such as Michael Mulkay, have turned to writing plays within their texts, to overcome theoretical problems (27). One could argue that it has already happened - The Prisoner.
Go back to the Patrick McGoohan page to read the next part of The Anarchic Prisoner by Kevin Patrick Mahoney
1). Alain Carraze and Helene Oswald, The Prisoner, Virgin, 1995, p.223.
2). Ibid., p.226.
3). Ibid., p.238.
4). David Healey, In the Village, Six of One, No.11, Summer 1996, p.6.
5). Ibid., p.7.
6). Carraze, op. cit. p.10.
7). Carraze, op. cit. p.12.
8). Carraze, op. cit. p.10.
9). Jonathan Coe, 'Low Culture Rises Above its Critics', in The Sunday Times: Culture, 20 November 1994, p.10.
10). Ibid., p.8.
11). Ibid., p.10.
12). Ibid., p.9.
13). Ibid., p.9.
14). Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism, Routledge, 1992, p.127.
15). Ibid., p.81.
16a). Ibid., p.127.
16b). Roland Barthes, Image - Music - Text, Fontana, 1977, pp. 146-47.
17). Carraze, op. cit. p.26.
18). John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences, Routledge, 1995, pp.272-73.
19). Ibid., p. 23.
20). Constance Penley, 'Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture', in Lawrence Grossberg et al, Cultural Studies, Routledge, 1992, p.496.
21). Carraze, op. cit., p.39.
22). Toni Morrison, Beloved, Picador, 1988, p.191.
23). Anthony Clavane, 'Let's hear it for Reg Varney's barmy army', The Independent: 24 Seven, 4 October 1996, p.4.
24). Penley, op. cit. p.496.
25). J. Wolff, The Social Production of Art, MacMillan, 1981, p.133.
26). L. S. Kauffman, 'The Long Goodbye', in G. Greene et al., ed. Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, Routledge, 1993, p.138.
27).
Michael Mulkay, The Word and the World, George Allen and Unwin, 1985,
pp.156-70, +pp.252-55.
