• 1 Fagan, Jenni, ‘Jenni Fagan introduces The Panopticon’, Windmill Books, http://youtu.be/DqawLwbobxY, (...)

2Young Anais only ‘completely came to life as her own being’ once her author paradoxically ‘let her speak for herself […] including the fact that she speaks in Scottish.’1 The possibility of emancipation is thus closely connected to the practice of storytelling, and to the opportunity of controlling the narrative medium that is the voice. Anais’ claim to autonomy pits her against the alienating narratives of the care system, authoritative ‘messages’ that cristallise her status as a delinquent: only by closing her case file and taking over the story of her own life can she hope to have a ‘future.’ The intrication of voice and narrative with the character’s claim to freedom creates a rift with the author herself as the agency who wields verbal power, a rebellion that blurs any ontological distinction between the writer and the creature speaking out from the page.

• 2 See Fludernik, Monika, ‘Panopticisms: fantasy metaphor reality’, Textual Practice 31:1 (2017), pp.1 (...)

3The story begins as the 15-year-old is driven by police to the Panopticon. Under suspicion of battering a police officer into a coma, she will wait there until a court hearing decides on her future. The facility owes its name to the model penitentiary after which it was built, fulfilling its original role as a prison before it was turned into an asylum, and now under refurbishment as a care facility for chronic young offenders. Fagan’s architectural choice confirms the good fortune that panopticism has known in contemporary fiction, especially since Foucault’s hugely influential interpretation of Bentham’s original project in Discipline and Punish.2 However, where it inspired literary criticism, the adoption of the 18^th century blueprint seems to promise anything but the possibility of emancipation. In fact, the bleak prospect of authoritarian visuality too easily conjured up by the Panopticon as trope famously inspired Dorrit Cohn’s to critique overzealous uses of the category in her field.

• 3 Cohn, Dorrit, ‘Optics and Power in the Novel’, in The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore, Johns Hopk (...)
• 4 ‘Foucault rather obsessively overstates the absolute power of the one-way gaze that he derives from (...)
• 5 Cohn’s critique particularly targeted Mark Seltzer’s Henry James and the Art of the Novel (1984), D (...)
• 6 Cohn quotes Michel Foucault’s ‘The Subject and Power,’ Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), pp.777-95: ‘Powe (...)
• 7 Cohn, D., ‘Optics and Power’, p.180

4In ‘Optics and the Power in the Novel,’ the last chapter of her Distinction of Fiction,3 Cohn deplored the recent addition of ‘panopticism’ to the visual metaphors traditionally used to describe fiction. Three of the arguments she made against the hasty and unscientific adoption of the word in the analysis of narrative provide fertile ground for the interpretation of Fagan’s novel. Cohn first opposed the metaphorical tools of narratology such as windows and mirrors, which typically functioned as observational categories, to the politically charged economy of vision inherent in the Panopticon. Foucault’s reading of Bentham tended to establish a confusion between the materiality of visual dispositives and the pervasive imaginary of surveillance. Cohn also indicated that while Foucault himself overstated the absolute nature of the power wielded by the gaze,4 literary critics5 erred even further in that direction. Ultimately, their anxious reframing of the visual field as the site of a power struggle overlooked the democratic framework in which discipline and surveillance emerged. Critics forgot that in order to be disciplined a subject has to be free,6 and that to ‘break down’ the back and forth movement of seeing and being seen you had to assume it existed in the first place. Their worst mistake however consisted in applying the model of disciplinary surveillance to the schemas of narrative, as if characters, narrators and readers could be thought to interact as agencies on the same ontological footing. Until we might find more scientifically sound intersections between the fields, Cohn intimated, ‘we had better close down the Panopticon.’7

• 8 See Monika Fludernik, ‘Surveillance in Narrative: Post-Foucauldian Interventions’, in Narrating Sur (...)
• 9 See pp.51-60

5Over two decades later, Fagan’s novel is one of many texts that testify that her advice has not been heeded: the Panopticon has kept appearing, both in literary criticism and in fiction.8 How can we interpret those narratives that do bring it up, especially in light of Cohn’s reluctance to its implications as a critical trope? And does it make sense to stage a character’s claim to autonomy in the anxiety-ridden space of the Panopticon, under the all-seeing gaze of the watchtower? In ‘Surveillance in Narrative’9 Monika Fludernik points out that Fagan rather exceptionally plays with both strands of the Panopticon’s history, as the narrative deals with the fate of Bentham’s architectural model and social regulation project (the original ‘Panopticon’), as well as the visual ideology it has inspired (or ‘panopticism’). What this paper ambitions to do is precisely to see how this contemporary representation of the Panopticon helps us respond to Cohn’s indictment, and rise to the challenges she outlined for its role within fiction.

• 10 See Fludernik, ‘Panopticisms’

7When Cohn made her assessment of panopticism in the literary field, the Panopticon as architectural setting seemed already to have faded into the background, leaving in its place the ‘panoptic vision’ derived from Foucault’s analysis, and the ideological framework on which it relied. Fagan’s Panopticon does explore the visual universe of Foucault’s surveillance societies, but also grapples with the physical persistence of the Panopticon as a place to inhabit and which haunts us in return.10 In this case, the power of the facility to inspire a specific imaginary of discipline does not project an oversimplified understanding of narrative processes: rather, it speaks to Anais’s anxious fantasies of being a social ‘experiment,’ and sheds light on the way her inner fictions of escape and internment interact with social narratives.

• 12 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, transl. A. Sheridan (New York, Vintage, 1979), Il faut défe (...)
• 13 Fludernik, M., ‘Surveillance in Narrative’, p.51
• 14 See Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, p.26
• 15 See Fludernik, M., ‘Panopticisms’, pp.16-21
• 16 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.116
• 17 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.34
• 18 Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, p.200

10Though its presence as a discursive filter is not immediately perceptible, Foucault’s interpretation clearly intervenes in our reading of the Panopticon.12 Indeed the novel ‘provides a link between the older architectural model of panopticism and newer surveillance mechanisms’13 via Foucault’s analysis of surveillance societies. This is all the more coherent as CCTV monitoring has become ubiquitous across shared spaces of visibility, beyond prisons and other institutions dedicated to social control. This new surveillance regime does feature in the novel in that Fagan stages a society that has fully embraced constant video monitoring as part of its ‘political technology,’14 and rationalised its visual field so it will work as a disciplinary dispositive. While these visual technologies typically deviate from panoptic vision by their preventive and generalised approach,15 CCTV footage of Anais explicitly emerges in the context of a police investigation, as proof of her status as a delinquent. Brought into the police station for questioning, she is presented with recordings of previous offences: ‘The CCTV footage is in order of dates; he presses Play. It’s me. I’m a movie star, Mama, are you proud?’16 In the voice of an orphan who doubts she was born of a woman the commentary is both poignant and tongue-in-cheek. Its casual equation of CCTV with cinematic stardom reaches beyond surveillance, into a visual culture that has infinitely expanded modalities of making oneself seen. Yet references to this constant over-exposure emphasise Anais’s disconnection from it, as when she states that she ‘dinnae get people’ who ‘even at home’ are ‘going online to look and see who they can watch, and to check who’s watching them!’.17 What her bewilderment confirms is that while common citizens might not let ubiquitous surveillance deter them from seeking the thrill of being seen, for Anais ‘visibility is a trap,’18 as Foucault described when he characterised disciplinary regimes.

• 19 See Fludernik, M., ‘Surveillance in Narrative’, p.52.
• 20 See Pittin-Hédon, Marie-Odile, ‘Punishment and Crime in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon’, in Le crime, (...)
• 21 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.10
• 22 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.10
• 23 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.102
• 24 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.53
• 25 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.67

11Though Fagan’s Panopticon differs in some details from Bentham’s blueprint,19 its distribution of visuality fulfills the principles listed by Foucault.20 The tower commands perfect visibility over the entire facility: ‘From the watchtower it could see into every bedroom, every landing, every bathroom. Everywhere.’21 The power exercised over the visual field is analytical. By identifying each individual in isolation it prevents any risk that they recognise each other as equals and gather as a rebellious crowd: ‘Each of those bedrooms used to be a cell. […] I suppose it was so each inmate could only see the watchtower, they couldnae see their neighbours. Divide and conquer.’22 Though the watchtower is not in use during daytime it remains impenetrable to the eye, and when Anais requests to ‘look up there’ her social worker indicates that it is ‘out of bounds.’23 The interdiction to see means the structure has kept up with the surveillance principle of breaking down the back and forth movement of visual connection, as the use of reflective glass confirms: ‘All the floors and bedroom doors are reflected in the window. Even me, I am in it too, looking up at myself.’24 Anais’s intuition that ‘that watchtower doesnae even need staff in it; it just watches – all on its own’25 echoes Foucault’s assessment that surveillance does not require an overseer as long as inmates know they could be watched at all times, thereby ensuring the automatic functioning of the disciplinary gaze. That last element of the panoptic puzzle famously turns subjugated inmates into relays of the gaze whose presence they assume: in the end, disciplinary visuality is so well internalised that it is enforced in the absence of any human guard.

• 26 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.10
• 27 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.1
• 28 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.31
• 29 Fagan, J., Panopticon, pp.33-34. See also p. 97.
• 30 On the transition from actual vision to impalpable oversight, see Fludernik, M., ‘Surveillance in N (...)
• 31 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.122
• 32 Fludernik, M., ‘Surveillance in Narrative’, p.59

12The successful alienation of individuals under the gaze of the watchtower plays a crucial part in the setup of the novel’s first-person narrative and internal focalisation. From the minute she enters the facility, Anais associates its visual dispositive with her own anxious fantasies of constant, intrusive monitoring, stating: ‘This place has experiment written all over it.’26 In ‘experiment,’ the reader recognises one of the first words of the novel, from an italicised paragraph that serves as prologue to the story: ‘I’m an experiment. I have always been. It’s a given, a liberty, a fact. They watch me. […] They watch me not cry. They watch me lie like an angel […] They watch me, I know it, and I can’t find anywhere anymore – where they can’t see.’27 The assumption of a terrifyingly ubiquitous gaze that sets the first person against a nameless collective third person establishes an uncomfortable mirror relation between the protagonist and her fantasised tormentors, entirely in keeping with the process of alienation via surveillance. An orphan, Anais assumes she was grown ‘from a bit of bacteria in a Petri dish. An experiment, created and raised just to see exactly how much […] a nobody from nowhere can take.’28 She also metonymically designates the organisation that set up this scientific protocol as ‘the experiment,’ and associates their presence to the watchtower, especially at night: ‘That surveillance window in the watchtower glitters in the dim. Dinnae look up. There could be anyone behind that glass. Five men in suits with no faces. All watching.’29 The absence of faces or noses, a recurrent feature in her descriptions of the experiment, completes the breakdown of the back and forth movement of the gaze: even if she could see into their lair, Anais could never actually look at the men. And indeed, though the visual space of the Panopticon is fully invested by her dark fantasy, it does sound as if they have gone much further than political technology ever could, replacing empirical vision with magical powers of visual penetration.30 To the experiment nothing is invisible, not even the confines of the individual’s subconscious: ‘You could imagine them like a man […] staring in your bedroom window while you sleep. Every night he comes and watches your dreams like he’s watching the telly.’31 One interpretation of the connection between panoptic vision and Anais’s paranoid musings, especially given the chronological precedence of the ‘experiment,’ is to see the presence of the Panopticon as a visual correlative to the portrait of a psyche devastated by ‘persecution mania.’32 A vestige of Bentham’s project, the facility which too often fails in its supervisory role highlights, by contrast, the watertight system of surveillance that Anais pathologically hallucinates. The first-person narrative and internal focalisation draw us into this visual paranoia, leaving us powerless as we share Anais’s trauma and drug-induced hallucinations, undecided as to her mental state.

• 33 See Fludernik, ‘Surveillance in Narrative,’ p. 53, or Pittin-Hedon, ‘Punishment and Crime’, p.168.
• 34 Fagan, Jenni, ‘‘We are all observed now’: Jenni Fagan on The Panopticon’, The Guardian, October 201 (...)

13Yet another way to interpret the sudden appearance of the Panopticon in Anais’s life suggests that her skewed experience of visuality has less to do with her psychological makeup33 than with a social organisation of the visual field that defines her as a delinquent and has reduced ‘care’ to surveillance and punishment. In that sense the Panopticon does not so much enhance Anais’s pre-existing visual paranoia, as give visible shape to processes that posit her as a deviant subject to watch, and feed her sense of alienation. Just as the experiment is the dystopian, sci-fi embodiment of a welfare system that only works to discipline, ‘[t]he building is a visual representation of Anais’s entire experience of care.’34 What is more, the non-referential, visual manifestations (‘I keep imagining,’ ‘you could imagine them,’ ‘he […] watches your dreams’) which Anais conjures up to give palpability to the experiment also say something of narrative practices, and their impact on her ability to inscribe her own perspective within a collective story and common landscape. In the fantasy of mind-reading and ‘dream-watching,’ we recognise an essential ingredient of narrative processes, including as Cohn described them in Transparent Minds. This encourages us to question practices of storytelling as Anais has encountered them in her life, and to analyse visual alienation and anxiety not simply as the fallout of a psychological condition exacerbated by the Panopticon, but as the structure of feeling to which she has been exposed in the care system.

• 35 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.11

14Although Fagan’s Panopticon once functioned as a prison and madhouse, its contemporary version has diverged significantly from Bentham’s design. Anais herself notes: ‘opposite the door to the office, there is a wee ornate wooden door […] This place would have been nicer once, more Gothic. It’s been social-work-ised, though, it’s depressing as fuck.’35 The flourishes of the original building and its contemporary takeover by social work all depart from Bentham’s project. This is yet another sign that the Panopticon owes its existence to discourse, whether literary or theoretical, as much as to the 18^th-century blueprint. Accordingly, Anais’s story confirms Foucault’s intuition on the failure of the ambition to reform inmates through surveillance. The modern prison system puts a complex combination of knowledge and power to use, not in the punishment of crimes but in the production of a category of marginal individuals, which it works to isolate from society at large. In the case of Fagan’s Panopticon this is emblematised by ongoing plans to open a new secure unit which would bring the facility closer to its original vocation by substituting indefinite detention to the idea of rehabilitation. Foucault’s version of the Panopticon sheds light on the collusion of biopolitics, political technology and the production of knowledge within an alienating care system: it also speaks to narrative practices and the visual metaphors they rely on, a point which prompts reconsideration of Cohn’s reservations.

• 36 Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, p.227
• 37 Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, p.204

15The most obvious way in which the invention of discipline transformed the penal system according to Foucault was that it replaced a system of crimes and punishments with one whose vocation is to accumulate endless data on individuals perceived as threats, the dream of ‘an indefinite discipline: […] an investigation that would be extended without limit […], a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed.’36 As a ‘laboratory of power,’37 the Panopticon is meant to maximise the production of visual knowledge: it has not only forgotten its vocation as a reformative tool, but also left behind the notion of investigating offenses and punishing criminals accordingly. The police inquest gives way to an infinite accumulation of information, with no ambition to close or solve cases. What this points to is a perversion of the metaphorical economy of vision characteristic of the Enlightenment: instead of producing knowledge that will ensure a fair exercise of political power, the light shone on the delinquent only serves to perpetuate their position under the disciplinary gaze.

• 38 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.188

16This shift is at the heart of Anais’s story: for all the deceptive focus on the police investigation, the novel never brings up any conclusive elements on the crime that brought Anais to the Panopticon. She herself blacked out, which means her narrative is fragmented, unreliable. Clues such as her bloody clothes seem to hold some promise, especially when they cause flashes of recognition–as in when she remembers carrying a dead squirrel the afternoon PC Craig was assaulted. However these elements only lead to dead ends, and the scientific processing of clues is exposed by the narrative as purely conditioned on the police’s pre-written narrative. When lab results confirm that the blood on Anais’s shirt was not PC Craig’s, the young woman asks: ‘Does that mean they know I didnae do it?’, but her social worker indicates ‘it just means they are now looking for other proof.’38 Anais is not only presumed guilty: any proof that might deviate the police from their plan to punish her is pushed aside, while they move on to look for other confirmations of guilt. The matter of the blood, which was the most incriminating piece of evidence, is never solved: after Anais remembers rescuing the squirrel new tests undercut her alibi by confirming that it was human rather than animal.

• 39 See Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish, pp.251-52
• 40 Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, p.18
• 41 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.176

17The untiring energy of a system intent on defining the individual’s fate rather than punishing them for their crime, evokes Foucault’s analysis of the substitution of the traditional figure of the perpetrator with that of the delinquent. While the offender is defined as such by his crime, what makes a delinquent is an entire life, which the theatre of prison restages.39 Foucault sees this change in the personnel of the penal system as part of a transition whereby judges across modern Europe set out to judge the very ‘souls’ of criminals. This was made possible by the development of psychiatric expertise and criminal anthropology, as the scientific dimension of these disciplines ‘provid[ed] the mechanisms of legal punishment with a justifiable hold not only on offences, but on individuals; not only on what they do, but also on what they are, will be, may be.’40 The collusion of knowledge and surveillance in the enforcement of disciplinary power is manifested by the production of narratives on delinquents which venture into unreferential territory, projecting what the delinquents will be and might do. Cohn criticised the conflation of different ontological planes that occurred when critics exposed the ‘panoptic power’ of omniscient narrators. But such a breach is precisely at stake when figures of authority assume that scientific understanding of a subject allows them to look into their innermost thoughts and see their future. The ability to look into a character’s ‘transparent mind’ or to envision their fate can characterise a fictional narrator’s relation to their creations, but not the interaction between human beings. Yet it repeatedly resurfaces in the way adults look at Anais and tell her story. At the hearing, her considerable case file legitimises the use of the ongoing, as yet unproven case to the chairwoman, who retorts to Angus’s objection by flaunting her knowledge of Anais: ‘With all due respect, Mr Everlen, I’ve known Miss Hendricks a lot longer than you have. […] We have pages […] and pages of charges, and this isn’t even half of them.’41 The chairwoman has drawn a conclusion as to what happened to PC Craig. She has also made her mind up about Anais’s fate, and repeatedly explains her decision by using the future mode:

• 44 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.70

20Looking into Anais’s eyes, the nurse reads directly into her memories: from the most trivial to the intimate and painful, her past is exposed entirely. It is no coincidence that the night nurse is the only member of staff who occupies the watchtower. To an extent, Anais’s fantasy that the experiment might one day ‘make [her] thoughts glow a different colour in [her] see-through skull [s]o they could read them’44 connects with her experience within the narratives of the care system. It is hardly more irrational than the predetermined story built on the assumption that her very soul has been bared to the authorities.

• 45 See Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, p.271, and the section entitled ‘Illegalities and delinque (...)
• 46 See Pittin-Hedon, M-O., ‘Punishment and Crime’, p.166
• 47 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p. 220, original emphasis.

21Because it no longer manages perpetrators but endlessly produces the delinquents whose stories it tells, the penal system is bound to fail in its ambition to reform45. That is the source of the jarring differences in the vocabulary used by the staff of the Panopticon and its ‘clients.’46 Angus makes a specific note of the young offenders’ words to describe themselves: ‘inmate’ ‘because they believe they are in training for the “proper jail”’, ‘lifer’ in the case of Anais.47 The programmatic identification to lifetime prisoners perfectly brings out, within the care system, the dysfunction and systematic (re)production of a marginal category that Foucault saw in the modern prison system.

• 49 Fagan, J. Panopticon, n. p.
• 50 Fagan, J. Panopticon, p.1

23The reminder that the 18^th century based the liberties it invented in alienation, so that it must constitute an ambivalent inheritance for us, is echoed by Fagan in the epigraph by Wilde: ‘When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.’49 The word appears again mere seconds later, as Anais intimates that her nature as an experiment is ‘a given, a liberty, a fact.’50 The uncertain meaning of ‘liberty’ in this context further highlights the ambiguity of what we might have otherwise taken for granted as a positive legacy of the Enlightenment.

• 51 The distinction is crucial to an interpretation of Foucault’s analysis, though the apparent proximi (...)

24What the presence of the Panopticon signals, therefore, is that Anais’s tale unfolds in the context of a Western democracy, an heir to Bentham’s and other Enlightenment philosophers’ political thought: the young protagonist’s despair is not caused by a totalitarian regime, but the product of a State whose welfare system is anchored in the ideals of democracy.51 There is reason to believe that this contributes to the chilling effect the novel produces as a commentary on care. The impact of thus reevaluating the bases of our social and political systems partly explains the enduring powerfulness of Foucault’s analysis, and arguably contributed to the shock value of early studies into panoptic narrative. Yet the characterisation of the panoptic subject as one who should or could be free and ‘cared for’ by the State does not only work to expose, by contrast, the scandal of their treatment. When Foucault pointed out that discipline presupposed the freedom of the inmates as individuals, and when he wrote of ‘breaking down’ the back and forth movement of the gaze, which supposed the precedence of visual exchange over isolation and control, he delineated precisely the means by which panoptic visuality might be resisted, and the Panopticon brought down.

• 52 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.186

25Among Cohn’s reasons for critiquing references to panoptic vision was her intimation that Foucault overstated the nature of visual power within the surveillance dispositive, so that critics adopting his terminology presented the visuality of the novel as a paranoid nightmare. Anais’s experience of the Panopticon arguably takes a different turn. The facility provides a historical, concrete corollary to the ‘watching feeling’52 that has been haunting her for as long as she can remember. Yet as an actual setting, a half-functional building in transition between different uses, the Panopticon brings out the cracks in the logic of surveillance. As a reference to Bentham’s model it points to the origins of panopticism in a democratic project, which presupposed any subject’s freedom and their ability to return the gaze.

• 53 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, Duke University Press (...)
• 54 Mirzoeff, N., The Right to Look, p.2
• 55 Mirzoeff, N., The Right to Look, p.3
• 56 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.8
• 57 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.220
• 58 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.6

26The Panopticon signals that visibility can be both a trap and a resource, in which one may claim what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls ‘the right to look.’53 Defining visuality as ‘that authority to tell us to move on, that exclusive claim to be able to look,’54 Mirzoeff indicates that ‘the autonomy claimed by the right to look is […] opposed by the authority of visuality.’55 The claim to returning the gaze therefore presents itself as a means of resistance to visual authority, a step towards emancipation–and one that definitely counteracts the breakdown of visual contact implemented by the Panopticon. Given the verbal and visual complex of narratives by which the authorities keep Anais in check and on her trajectory to ‘the proper jail,’56 we can anticipate two ways for her to dissent and achieve autonomy: by claiming a right to look and speaking back to power. The youth kept in the Panopticon know what is at stake in the opportunity to return the gaze: it is the basis on which they challenge their designation by the system as ‘clients,’ for ‘[c]lients have the right to respond.’57 Sometimes the ability to hold your own in the face of authority is all that can keep you from disappearing altogether, as poignantly evidenced by Anais’s experience of panic, shrinking down during a police interrogation until ‘all that’s left is a tiny pinprick for me to stare back.’58

• 60 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.19

28The cynical, self-serving wish for a ‘rough’ look that would better reflect on her own charitable role in Anais’s life gives all its meaning to the term ‘uniform.’ More than a visual trend adopted by young people, the extensions, tracksuit and bling have become part of a public perception that in turn authoritatively categorises those who wear them. What might have been individual choice has turned into a tool visually to recognise troubled youths. Despite Anais’s initial apprehension, the appearance of some of the residents immediately suggests that she might find similarly dissenting spirits there. Tash sports a ‘curly moustache drawn on her upper lip,’ ‘three fine brown spirals, on each cheek’.60 Her distinctive facial hairstyle undercuts expectations of what a girl of her age might look like.

• 61 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.15
• 62 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.239

29Another way of reclaiming power over one’s visibility is to break the rule of constant surveillance by evading the eye of the watchtower. When Anais arrives she is longing for ‘a hole under the ground to live in. Or a treehouse. Somewhere nobody can see [her]’61 and balks at the open plan design of the facility. Yet the place itself leads her to secret places in which to hide away: going through the little ornate door that immediately attracted her attention, and up the stairs of a turret, she finds a bit of roof that will be a refuge during her stay, especially after Isla’s death. Two months later she states that the Panopticon ‘almost feels like home, cos of, like, Shortie, and Isla, even Angus, and the roof.’62 What makes a home are people to hold dear and places that protect you from sight: the addition of the secret nook to a sequence of first names suggests the importance of its affective impact.

• 63 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.317
• 64 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.318
• 65 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.318
• 66 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.318
• 67 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.319

30Beyond breaking the rules of the Panopticon, however, Anais and her companions eventually claim their right of response by neutralising the structure of surveillance itself, destroying the setup that guarantees the ubiquity and invisibility of the gaze. After Isla’s burial, the group use the opportunity of a memorial ceremony to create a pandemonium. When the passage opens the residents find themselves captured as usual under the gaze of the watchtower: ‘[T]he watchtower is glittering, and we are reflected in it, as always.’63 Similarly, the Minister’s allocution is meant to control the explosion of absurdity and violence that her suicide represented for all. The Christian narrative is one that brings Isla back into the fold, and makes sense of her death by negating the autonomy of her gesture, referring to the deity instead: ‘God knew what was best for Isla, a lost sheep in his flock.’64 But authority, both visual and discursive, cannot contain the residents’ grief and outrage. Their sense of scandal is expressed as they look back–‘Look at the watchtower: look at it! Watching all this, it’s sick’65 –and talk back–‘Was [God] with [Isla] when she fucking died, on her own, up those fucking stairs?’66 These challenges to the legitimacy of authority are followed by a riotous takeover in which lights and windows are smashed. The destruction of those optical devices encapsulates the residents’ rejection of the visual dispositive that has kept them under exposure. It negates the ideal of perfect visibility and legibility upheld by the facility, and prefigures the ultimate attack launched by Anais: ‘I raise the lit bottle […] and launch it – up, up. […] The whole surveillance window shatters, and I see them – turning on their fucking tails – the experiment, for a fraction of a fucking second: exposed.’67 As the tinted glass breaks, the protagonist does not only achieve her goal of forcing the experiment out of the obscurity from which they have been watching, turning the tables on them and looking back as they hide away from her. In reestablishing the possibility to look into the watchtower, she takes away the gaze of authority’s panoptic, impalpable command over the visual field from everywhere and nowhere. She effectively brings down the Panopticon itself, and manages to run away, which brings the novel to a close.

• 68 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.53

31From the moment she entered the Panopticon, however, Anais’s visual and verbal presence within the facility tended to subvert its disciplinary order. Her perspective transforms the visuality of the building, not least because she invests it with her imagination, thereby counteracting the rationalist, data-oriented logic of panoptic vision and of the care system. This can be felt as she turns the watchtower into a fantastic ‘bug’ with ‘white eyes that follow you around’.68 The giant insect is no less threatening in its watch, but it is the product of Anais’s visual perception and narrative creativity. Even her associating the watchtower with the experiment actively counteracts the actual process of surveillance, as her description of the noseless men puts a darkly fantastic twist on the scientific goals of panoptic observation and data collection.

• 69 See Fludernik, ‘Surveillance in Narrative’, p.52.
• 70 On the implications of the Scottish gothic see McCulloch, Fiona, ‘‘Daughter of an Outcast Queen’: D (...)
• 71 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.75
• 72 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.76
• 73 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.76
• 74 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.79
• 75 Mirzoeff, N., The Right to Look, p.4

32The role played by the irrational and magical in Anais’s subversion of disciplinary visuality is most palpable when she flouts panoptic vision by noting fanciful architectural elements that are not part of Bentham’s blueprint. One of those is a turret–there is a pair of them on either side of the crescent-shaped building at the Panopticon.69 Its neo-gothic style70 clashes with the depressing atmosphere of the ‘social-work-ised’ facility, and promises the forbidden secrets Anais longs to encounter. In chapter 5 she finally manages to break into its fourth floor. The room she enters dates back to when the Panopticon served as an asylum; it is still equipped with apparatuses used in electro-shock therapy. Without avoiding the grimmest elements of the scene, Anais’s depiction mixes imaginative details and empirical observations, as she observes: ‘There are white sheets draped everywhere – it’s a snow scene in a derelict theatre. A faceless, dusty sheet is a polar bear, arching up a paw. Beside him there’s a snow sleigh. A snow wolf thrusts his nose out, sniffing for blood.’71 The fictional filter that assimilates psychiatric appliances to polar animals is fully assumed as a narrative choice, as the reference to the theatre indicates: Anais claims her role as storyteller by openly setting a stage, however humble (‘derelict’). The danger that lurks right at the heart of the landscape, in the presence of the bear and woolf ‘sniffing for blood,’ anticipates the realisation that the ‘sleigh’ is actually an electroshock table, complete with ankle- and wrist-straps, and ‘another […] which has teeth marks on it.’72 Instead of breaking the charm, and turning the picturesque scene into a torture chamber, the evocation of electroconvulsive therapy blends in with the awe-inspiring description that preceded it. In a gesture of rebellion against the violation of bodies whose faculties of imagining and speaking were ‘fried out,’73 Anais masturbates, bringing up images of former lovers and concluding: ‘They cannae have my memories, not even the bad ones. They dinnae belong to them.’74 Among the processes whereby visuality asserts its authority, Mirzoeff mentions its tendency to aestheticise itself, appearing as pleasing to the eye and therefore right. An emancipatory response to the aesthetics of power promotes an ‘aesthetics of the body’ understood as a locus of needs and desires.75 In the passage Anais brings the full weight of her imagining, desiring body, pitting it against the cruel erasure of patients such as her birth mother.

• 76 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.4
• 77 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.156

33The first architectural detail that allows Anais to start deconstructing the Panopticon is also neo-gothic in style, visually unscientific and fanciful: it is the ‘winged cat’ the residents refer to as Malcolm, a gargoyle sitting on one of the pillars that frame the gateway. When first driving past the statue Anais feels compelled to ‘turn around and gaze back.’ But Malcolm also makes her ‘look back’ metaphorically: it suggests a preternatural connection with her birth story as told by a monk who witnessed it in the asylum where he lives, and who sent her a drawing of a winged cat.76 Throughout the novel Malcolm plays a crucial role in Anais’s claim to autonomy from social workers and the experiment itself, as when she ‘goe[es] off their radar’ by flying away on his back.77

• 78 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.100
• 79 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.121

34What transpires from Anais’s successful efforts at turning social work into witchcraft and giving constant observation the shape of prowling beasts is that the claim to speak back is also a claim to fiction: a claim to imagining things differently from the way they might look. Fiction appears as an antidote to the destructive, standardised narratives the care system churns out by the dozen. Anais tells us: ‘I dinnae trust social workers or their stupid stories. I’m a bit unconvinced by reality, full stop. It’s fundamentally lacking in something, and nobody seems bothered.’78 Cohn was wary of panopticism being brought in as a key to interpret non-referential narrative: as a historiographic tool it must necessarily oversimplify stories that belonged to a different plane of existence. In The Panopticon, however, non-referential narrative comes into contact with panoptic visuality because it belongs to an ontological order distinct from the one in which disciplinary visuality is enforced: fiction opens up spaces that contradict the constraints of surveillance, it suggests new ways of visually belonging with others. In that respect the ‘birthday game’ the protagonist plays, endlessly reinventing the story of her birth, presents itself as an imaginative form of resistance to a file that presents her as a collection of numbers: ‘7652.4 – Section 48 was my first name. Seriously, they couldnae even give me a name until they’d filed me […] and decided what I came under for sectioning.’79

• 80 Mirzoeff, N., The Right to Look, p.4

35Another means of countering the logic of panopticism entails conjuring up a community that the analytical gaze of surveillance works to keep divided, by looking at one’s equals within the system and recognising them as kin. To Mirzoeff, the right to look ‘refuses to be segregated, and spontaneously invents new forms.’80 The same imaginative creativity that contradicts disciplinary visuality allows for the emergence of collective causes:

• 82 See Pittin-Hedon, Marie-Odile, ‘Punishment and Crime in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon’, in Le crime, (...)

36Even in a novel that made Bentham’s building one of its protagonists,82 the young residents’ ways of visually relating to one another and subverting the logic of surveillance suggests that a blanket interpretation of ‘panoptic vision’ fails to account for their visible world. It does not seem, however, that this is due to the distance between historiographic tools and literary reading, or because cultural studies oversimplify narrative fiction as Cohn intimated. What the novel suggests is that the visual field is made of multiple, competing practices and experiences of seeing and being seen, and not exclusively saturated with visual discipline. What The Panopticon’s recognisable but clearly different version of the visual dispositive points to are the nuances of the visual world we share, and the complexity of our need to navigate it and inscribe ourselves within it. By having the prison and ‘nut-house’ turned into a care facility, Fagan questions the way visual relations are structured in our collective management of mental health and social work. The conclusion she reaches is that the system has forfeited its duty of care: that it will watch, observe and overlook, rather than watch over, look after and care for. The young characters’ best hope of achieving autonomy lies in their ability to invent new forms of visual connection–by investing common visual spaces in which they will see with others, see others and be seen, in ways that sustain them.

• 83 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.8
• 84 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.318
• 85 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.263

37At the Panopticon, Anais identifies a familiar visual clue that ensures recognition between children in care. Passing as an electric current through their eyes, ‘the glint’ is not heart-warming, or reassuring: its appearance signals solidarity in anger, a sense of injustice so acute that a violent outbreak becomes all but inevitable. We are first told of the glint as Anais arrives at the facility: ‘I look up and it passes between us: the glint, it’s strong as sunlight and twice as bright. They can feel it in me. It can start a riot in seconds, that glint.’83 When destruction erupts after Isla’s funeral, Anais’s assesment of its power proves very accurate, as it ignites their fury: ‘[t]he glint’s here – in the room, passing around the kids, one by one.’84 It was there already as ambulance men came to collect Isla’s body: ‘The glint’s in the room, it’s dense as fuck. The staff can feel it, and we can feel it, and the fucking ambulance men can feel it – we are ready to take them all out. Every last one.’85 The threat was so palpable, in fact, that the adults made a concession for Anais, and agreed to take Isla out on a stretcher, as she demanded. For the residents the glint is a shibboleth, a tiny moment of visual recognition that allows them to act as a collective entity. But it is dangerous: the political subjectivity it precipitates easily turns from revolutionary to riotous, from riotous to murderous. From the point of view of panoptic discipline this legitimises the prevention strategy that consists in separating the residents, forbidding them to look at each other. Yet despite the violence that it can unleash, the glint emanates from a place of caring, acknowledging each other as kin and actively defending each other.

• 86 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.8
• 87 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.264
• 88 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.264

38The intensity of the glint is a reminder that visual contact need not be dispassionate and data-oriented: that in the way we look we also show how much we care, though the connection seemed antiphrastically to have fallen through since ‘care’ invested the Panopticon. The clearest indication that the system fails those under its watch, as Anais reminds us in the opening pages of the novel, is the ‘statistical fact’ that youth in care sometimes ‘just disappear.’86 The adverb, which minimizes the vanishing of young, vulnerable people, poignantly prefigures the moment when Tash goes missing after meeting a client. Noticing a few missing-persons posters at the train station, Anais is haunted by the collective indifference of the public: ‘People dinnae want to look. They dinnae want tae see. Nobody will ask.’87 The refusal to show any concern for Tash violently clashes with the devastation her disappearance means for the Panopticon, and in particular for her girlfriend. Isla will also vanish, as if by contagion, and Anais will be left to note the connection: ‘Disappearing. […] It happens as you write down the registration number for a car pulling away. […] It is happening right now as the ambulance men secure the stretcher with straps, so they can lift it into the ambulance.’88

• 89 Mirzoeff, N., The Right to Look, p.4

39If panopticism turned visibility into a trap, the young charges of the care system acknowledge disappearance as a symmetrical threat to their existence. Watching purely to collate statistics, the system no longer cares if its subjects vanish into thin air: that has actually become part of its narrative. The young residents’ only hope not to disappear therefore lies in visually caring for each other where adults will not–though even that could not prevent Tash’s abduction. Anais’s escape, facilitated by ‘the glint,’ is her ultimate gesture of resistance to the promise of disappearance under the uncaring eyes of the system. The formation of a community, however fragile and temporary, echoes Mirzoeff’s assessment that for those who tend to be invisibilised, kept away from political spaces, ‘the right to look is strongly interfaced with the right to be seen.’89 The residents of the Panopticon claim such a right: they seek felicitous modes of inscribing themselves in shared visual spaces, modes that will give them the assurance of another’s consideration and regard, the visual acknowledgment they need.

• 90 Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, p.202

40The importance of those relationships in Anais’s process of emancipation gives another dimension to our position as witnesses to her sometimes delirious narrative. The experiment’s practice of thought-reading means we cannot comfortably judge the protagonist, lest we identify with her tormentors. As we accompany Anais through bad trips and anxiety attacks, the use of internal focalisation does not so much make us intruders into her inner world as it asks us be empathetic witnesses to her utmost vulnerability. By preventing us from accessing her file or assessing whether she did commit the crime, the narrative dispositive has us sitting with her uncomfortably, uncertain of what to make of her story: ultimately it fashions itself as the opposite of the “house of certainty”90 that the Panopticon was meant to be.

• 91 Cohn, D., ‘Optics and Power’, p.164
• 92 Fludernik, M., ‘Surveillance in Narrative’, p.53
• 93 Fagan, J., Panopticon, n. p.

41From the visual nature of our role as witnesses to Anais’s habit of taking and keeping imaginary pictures of her surroundings, the novel explores the multiple ways in which visual contact can be made, and visual impressions shared. These practices of seeing are constitutive of a visual field that will sustain characters, hold them in a dialectics of seeing and being seen. In characterising critics’ anxious rejection of panoptic vision Cohn suggested it might be ‘related to the invisibly all-seeing parental eye […] that each and all of us secretly wish to find and blind.’91 This assessment of panopticism as a manifestation of resistance to the super-ego chimes in with Fludernik’s understanding of the experiment as ‘a kind of internalized super-ego, but one [Anais] rejects.’92 In this instance it seems rather that Anais’s condition as an orphan deprived her of a parental gaze that might not terrorise, but nurture and contain. The first epigraph to the novel, ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,’93 resonates with her story in that sense, as an encouragement for us to imagine a visual bond of care and consideration.

• 94 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.173
• 95 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.322
• 96 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.323

42As her hearing goes awry Anais muses that if she were on death-row she’d ask ‘to look my real mum, or dad, or granda in the eyes, so I’d know the experiment werenae really what made me. Imagine knowing that you came from people with hearts and souls?’94 One of three wishes, on a par with flying and simply ‘achieving something,’ the proof that she is a person, as seen in the eyes of her kin, features as a key to desires both fantasmatic and concrete, unattainable and reachable. This explains some of the visual details of the final train journey on which she is reborn as Frances. As she sits in her seat ‘opposite an elderly guy,’ she is encouraged to acknowledge his friendly demeanour: ‘the man smiles – and I smile back, but just quickly. ’S alright. Sometimes you can just tell the goodness of a person by their face.’95 In the short exchange that follows, we hear Anais’s chosen name for the first time: ‘‘What’s your name?’ he asks me. Tuck my hair behind my ear, look up. ‘Frances,’ I say. ‘That’s a nice name,’ he says.’96 The fact that we are not privy to Anais’s train of thought as she chose it, but hear it as witnesses to an entirely mundane verbal and visual exchange of niceties, speaks to Anais’s emancipation from the nightmare of panoptic surveillance and paranoid distrust. This is a person whose character she can trust, as she can trust her judgement of his appearance: we no longer stand as witnesses to her inner turmoil, or safeguard against her vanishing altogether. When considering the life that expects her she muses:

• 98 Fagan, J., Panopticon, p.324

43In the transition from the absence of disciplinary surveillance to her casual right to be seen in the middle of the Parisian landscape, ‘watching’ has been redefined: it is no longer punitive or predatory, but simply part of the process of seeing and being seen. The second person is both a potential intradiegetic traveler to Paris (‘you might go there’) and the implied reader, Frances’s addressee when she simultaneously opens and closes her first-person adventure with the sentence ‘I – begin today.’98 Ultimately we are the agency under whose eyes her rebirth is achieved, and from whom she seeks regard and consideration, as well as the willingness to suspend our disbelief and share in the hope of her fiction.