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Impressive as a whole, his toolkit is nevertheless employed selectively. Its use is characteristically geared toward uncovering a certain ideology of literary form, where form is either a dominant figure, a particular configuration of recurrent tropes, or narrative strategy such as omniscience. The best discussions of things ideological, the most effective Kritik generally obtain, as far as I am concerned, on a bottom-up model that operates inductively by drawing on incidents of “style”-a recurring image or storytelling device-and working itself up into broader considerations that bring together the textual and the contextual. To be sure, this is precisely where the ideological plays out, where it comes into being and holds sway over our lives: not inherently “in” specific cultural forms and formations or completely outside them but on their outer edge, where they and their environment seem to dovetail naturally and, as a result, inquiry, questioning, and revaluation may appear superfluous.
In dwelling on modernity’s fictional production of “carceral topography,” as Monika Fludernik calls it, Narrating the Prison shows that closing out such deliberations is ideologically ambiguous at best in that it projects carcerality as a self-evident carce-reality whose social meanings and roles are in no need of public debate. This is exactly the kind of collective projection Dickens takes to task in Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. Oddly enough, his critique is perhaps more insistent than that of later writers such as Robert E. Burns (I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, 1932), Thomas E. Gaddis (Birdman of Alcatraz, 1955), Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange, 1962), Stephen King (“Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” 1982), and Lorenzo Carcaterra (Sleepers, 1995), not to mention the directors who made movies (hence catered to larger audiences) based on these texts. In their works, Alber points out, a good deal of “naturalizing” cover-up goes on, that is to say, a whole constellation of prison tropes and narrative devices are deployed to the effect that prison stories end up corroborating a number of extant “certainties” about convicts, society, the judicial system, and the sociopolitical status quo such beliefs uphold.