Word: pasqualini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nothing else, Pasqualini's captors insist on form. The inmates are kept near starvation and Pasqualini is horrified by the sight of his body in a mirror: His skin sags slack and bruised from contact with the communal plank bed. Nonetheless, when someone filches food, it cannot be from hunger, and he is "struggled." After three days of hooting, Pasqualini begs relief from the warder for everyone involved: "He admits he stole the bread. He was hungry. Isn't that enough? Do we have to make him say he is a dirty bourgeois because he was hungry?" The warder responds...
...other hand, Pasqualini learns that form can serve a prisoner's ends, while obscruring the plain truth, just as easily. Although the government, or his jailers, have complete authority over his "body and soul," they are obliged to hear him out. For him, this entails careful ideological maneuvering. "Free speech is encouraged, especially if it remains within the accepted channels." In one case, ideological leverage gets him out of solitary. During the Great Leap Forward, Pasqualini roguishly tells another "schoolmate" that he should have received a mere day's sentence. Reported for mockery of the judicial system the warder casually...
...humorous form this imagery is applied to a laborer's efficiency and a program's projected output. A satellite signifies the most production possible. The best workers in the penal system are classified as rockets and the slower ones, progressively, as airplanes, locomotives, automobiles, bicycles and lastly, ox carts. Pasqualini recalls one worker who was demoted to the status of a turtle, which is not only slow, but the traditional Chinese symbol of a cuckold. However, pushed a little further, this preoccupation with mechanical efficiency leads to a demand for the man to emulate the machine...
...Although Pasqualini is finally transformed into a dedicated, right-thinking worker and prisoner, it is evident from his alert recognition of the method involved, even as the change is taking place in him, that he has not become an automaton. The mode of thought expected of him has been clarified; he feels supported and supportive--even more so when the French government rebuffs his written appeals. On a very basic level, his assimilation represents the kind of adjustment generally expected of its members by any social system...
Perhaps it is also important not to forget that Pasqualini is mostly Chinese, with a Chinese name, Bao Ruo-want and oriental feature. From a historical point of view, his country had stood up after being humiliated by the Western powers and Japan. The effort was a collective one, and equality between peasant, inmate, intellectual and warder was enforced, even if it was a wretched plight to share. As he says, "We didn't have any illusions about flying the coop." Things were pretty much the same outside the walls...